[HN Gopher] React and Remix Choose Different Futures
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       React and Remix Choose Different Futures
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2025-12-01 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (laconicwit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (laconicwit.com)
        
       | linkage wrote:
       | What is the value proposition of Remix 3 then? If it's going to
       | be incompatible with the official React ecosystem, why use Remix
       | instead of more performant alternatives like Solid/SolidStart
       | that don't have React's baggage?
        
         | tacker2000 wrote:
         | Yea, or Vue or Svelte?
        
         | davey48016 wrote:
         | I haven't followed Remix 3 closely. What baggage are they
         | taking from React apart from JSX?
        
         | postalrat wrote:
         | Why use Solid when the developer experience of Remix 3 is so
         | much better?
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | > Breaking backward compatibility isn't collateral damage, it's
       | the point.
       | 
       | LOL, if you say so.
       | 
       | Honestly, I don't know how anyone decides to build something on
       | top of the software the react router team puts out. I went
       | through approximately 2 major version upgrades of react router
       | then decided I was done with it unless I had no other choice.
       | 
       | Why do people think being left with huge upgrade tech debt time
       | and time again is worthwhile? There are just so many other
       | choices out there these days. Why you'd choose this "different
       | future" now is beyond me.
        
         | dimal wrote:
         | I went through the same pain with React Router. I would never
         | consider using Remix or anything else from this team. It
         | doesn't matter how great it might be or how much I might agree
         | with the architectural principles. Who knows what shiny new
         | idea they'll be chasing in Remix 4? I'd have to be crazy to
         | trust them.
        
         | 0x3f wrote:
         | Honestly, it was often that I just hated NextJS enough to deal
         | with the schlep of the Remix/RR churn.
         | 
         | But now TanStack Start is a thing, so they've lost the 'only
         | viable alternative' angle.
        
         | codinhood wrote:
         | It's kinda wild to take something people really like and just
         | keep re-writing it while keeping the same name.
         | 
         | They were around when Angular 1 -> Angular 2 right? No one
         | liked that. Angular 2 is good but calling it Angular 2 when it
         | was so different put a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
         | 
         | Google did that because they wanted the Angular userbase, but
         | that alienated a bunch devs and many decided to switch to React
         | (me included) instead.
         | 
         | Seems the remix/react router team is trying to do the same.
         | They built something popular, and they want to use that to
         | launch their new ideas.
         | 
         | They want to have their cake and eat it too, a built in
         | userbase and explore new ideas. I get it, but why not use
         | another name so people don't get confused or frustrated?
         | 
         | It's just exhausting
        
           | politelemon wrote:
           | It seems angular learned from it early on because upgrades
           | have been a quiet affair since then. React seem to be set on
           | repeatedly learning it.
        
             | aloha2436 wrote:
             | React itself is still the same fundamental product, not
             | something you can say for Remix or Angular.
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | Yeah, React Router keeps changing and keeps not quite feeling
         | right. Like they make bad abstractions and then get trapped by
         | them.
         | 
         | We're looking at Tanstack Router when we get around to it.
        
         | dobladov wrote:
         | This is my feel as well, I have to maintain a somewhat complex
         | custom SSR, and each update of react-router has been a pain,
         | basically when they moved from using regex URLs to simpler
         | paths, it was a reasonable decision, but the docs of the new
         | supported patters were lacking, newer docs versions are barely
         | searchable, or directly you won't find mentions to some
         | existing APIs anywhere.
         | 
         | I tried their "get started" project with the newly typed
         | routes, and it feels too complex, and unintuitive, the purpose
         | of a framework is to make your life easier, and it's sad to see
         | people with this much talent missing the goal, I won't be using
         | react-router for future projects.
        
       | epgui wrote:
       | > Simplicity (explicitly control when things update)
       | 
       | I'm not saying this is wrong, but it's a very very weird notion
       | of simplicity. It reminds me a bit of how C++ engineers argue
       | that for loops are simpler than comprehensions.
        
         | o11c wrote:
         | I have no real knowledge of React from the developer side, but
         | as an ordinary user who occasionally pokes around in dev tools
         | to assign blame, React clearly is failing at Simplicity.
         | 
         | There are _so_ many React websites where I see weird update
         | bugs (e.g. updates for some parts of the page delayed by 3
         | seconds [not blocking render, the rest of the page is
         | updating], or total wipe of something instead of incremental
         | upgrades - weren 't these the very problems React was supposed
         | to solve?).
         | 
         | Mere excessive bloatedness I don't blame React for; all sorts
         | of web dev fails at that.
         | 
         | ===
         | 
         | The main question I have for Remix is: does the explicit
         | `.update` trigger immediately, or does it wait so it can
         | coalesce multiple updates?
        
           | epolanski wrote:
           | React is a mess, Ivy league engineers building messy, slow,
           | sloppy, inaccessible, full of memory leak websites should be
           | a clear sign this is not a technology that fits most use
           | cases.
           | 
           | In react's devs defense, they've said multiple times you
           | should not use it if yours is a website and not really really
           | an app on html, but people keep thinking their website is
           | different and keep producing abominations like the new
           | GitHub.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | > Remix 3 chose Simplicity
       | 
       | i have no dog in this fight and am friends with both but i think
       | this is probably too much leaning into Remix's messaging. i think
       | easier to think about it as "Complex inside" (React) vs "Complex
       | outside" (Remix) - pull up a bunch of equivalent side by side
       | code examples of both to see (this was basically all of react
       | twitter in the month since remix relaunched)
       | 
       | of course React has let the complexity leak and leak and leak
       | over the last 5 years so now the messaging isnt as neat
        
       | lefrenchy wrote:
       | It seems like they need the self-awareness to say "if we have
       | gotten it so wrong that we needed to drastically lift and change
       | the foundation multiple times, then maybe we need to rethink our
       | first principles"
        
       | tacker2000 wrote:
       | Well I hope Shopify will have enough third party app developers
       | in the future, now that they have moved everything to GraphQL and
       | Remix (and killed all the other SDKs, like PHP for example), and
       | now that we willhave a non-React Remix soon.
       | 
       | Im pretty sure not many devs will switch to Remix just to work on
       | Shopify Apps...
        
         | theturtletalks wrote:
         | I'm convinced Shopify only bought Remix since so many Shopify
         | shops started using Next.js as an external storefront. Shopify
         | realized their moat was dissapearing and if users could roll
         | their own storefront, they were one step closer to rolling
         | their own backend.
        
         | jadbox wrote:
         | GraphQL is such a pain. The SDKs are usually bloated. Debugging
         | is a nightmare. Documentation on those APIs feeling adhoc.
         | Outside of rare use-cases, I feel like 99% of the time GraphQL
         | is engineering overkill than a simple resource-based REST
         | interface.
        
           | tacker2000 wrote:
           | Yea, i also dont like GraphQL. Why they needed to replace the
           | good old REST interface, which was working perfectly, I will
           | never understand.
           | 
           | The tech team there seems to be making some shortsighted
           | decisions in the last couple of years. Lets see if its going
           | to bite them in the long run...
        
           | 0x3f wrote:
           | The funniest thing about GraphQL is when it's set up to only
           | allow specific whitelisted queries. Incredible.
        
           | no_wizard wrote:
           | Automatic type a client generation that is extremely mature.
           | 
           | Even when using OpenAPI it's not as good
           | 
           | GraphQL has validation built in, that's another big one. For
           | non complex and non-specialized types it validates against
           | the schema quite well.
           | 
           | Query caching is dead simple and quite good
        
       | hitekker wrote:
       | I've been enjoying Vue recently. Its API so far feels like an
       | acceptable cognitive overhead over the raw DOM.
       | 
       | Plus, Evan You seems like a pretty stable and drama free
       | maintainer.
        
         | 9dev wrote:
         | If you haven't yet, also take a look at VueUse. It's
         | essentially a library of very useful utility composables that
         | come on handy very often, and make for astonishingly clean
         | components.
        
       | d13z wrote:
       | I love the idea of converge with the web and also like the
       | simplicity of being able to see what is happening. I've also
       | experienced the despair or having to debug the internals of a
       | library or a wrapper of a wrapper of a wrapper somebody thought
       | was a good idea to make. But I wonder how the future in a LLM
       | powered world could look like. Will LLMs privilege code that
       | require less tokens to read and to write? Will verbosity become a
       | monetary problem? Will short implicit Frameworks take the lead? I
       | wonder if frameworks will start to optimize for machines or
       | people.
        
       | jakubmazanec wrote:
       | This is what they should be done: what is now React Router v7
       | should have been Remix v3, and what is now Remix v3 should have
       | had a new name - it's a new framework that ostensibly makes
       | different choices, new make is a must! They told us for years
       | that Remix is just React Router with additional framework
       | features. That made sense.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-01 23:00 UTC)