Uber and virtual DOM

[AlexGalays]

Hey guys,

It appears this lib is abandonned and Uber now uses React. Is it the case? Out of curiosity, what's the rationale?

[iambumblehead]

Virtual DOM and its authors greatly influenced web development. Support for Virtual DOM dropped suddenly and completely with no announcement. What could have possibly happened?

The biggest mystery in web development history...

[chinedufn]

Out of curiosity, what's the rationale?

Hey, hopefully this comment sheds a bit of light on that question:

#332 (comment)

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tl;dr .. -> Matt-Esch/virtual-dom is more or less "finished". This is possible because of its intentionally narrow and specific focus. ~99.9% of all future "improvements" / "features" belong in user-land, and not in core.

As a quick random example.. virtual-dom doesn't have any sugar around thunking in core. Instead you would use something in user-land such as vdom-thunk

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Hope that helps!

[iambumblehead]

I have seen the comment that virtual-dom is "finished", but there must be more to the situation than that. Many PRs have accumulated here --47 now, https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/pulls. Is it necessary to ignore the PRs?

Several thousand people have starred this repo and many of them are using virtual-dom. The author never shows up here or in the gitter channel --if thousands of people used one of your packages, wouldn't you be inclined to come by and say "hi"?

Saying it is finished and then fully ignoring it forever afterward while thousands of people use it and blog about it seems odd.

[chinedufn]

A bunch of fair points indeed

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I haven't looked at every single pull request, but from a scan it seems like ~none of them are critical, and most of them are sugar that belongs in user-land.

In my opinion part of the deal with using software that we aren't paying for is the (sometimes harsh) reality that the author(s) might end up needing to dedicate their time elsewhere. The maintainer has no contractual obligation to the end user.

I think the beauty here is that since the maintainers did a great job of keeping a very small core, it really isn't (IMO) unreasonable to say that anyone with problems should take the liberty of forking virtual-dom, or replacing it with another library that better meets their expectations.

Curious about your thoughts of course, but those are mine!

[iambumblehead]

Virtual-dom achieved net fame and the author walked away. I'm just a curious to know what the reason for that is. "Its finished" could be the reason, but I don't think so. I want the scoop.