> To their credit, I think the React code itself has maintained reverse compatibility pretty well (it's not React's fault), but the build systems I was using 5 years ago have all changed and broken reverse compatibility.
That's a problem with your build system then, not React. There is (or was) indeed a lot of churn in build systems, but you wouldn't have been spared unless you had chosen to not use a build system - which is still possible with React, but not with Svelte, Vue or Angular.
My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.
This side conversation started as an objection to the comment, "Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years."
The first release of esbuild was November 2020, i.e. it didn't exist 5 years ago. And that release fixed... conditional statements in TypeScript--a pretty basic feature to be broken. Does that sound like something you want to use in production?
So maybe your strategy of only using things that work with esbuild doesn't address the problem as much as you think it does.
You are extrapolating from the past into the future, but a lot has consolidated in the last five years. You used to need babel to use crucial language features that are now supported across the board, at the same time the avalanche of new language features has subsided.
Conditional types (not statements) are not a basic feature.
> You are extrapolating from the past into the future, but a lot has consolidated in the last five years.
I've been writing JavaScript that entire time, and the complete disregard for maintenance has gotten worse, not better.
You seem to be under the impression that because I also write other languages, I haven't been keeping track of what's happening in the JS ecosystem, but you're wrong--I still write JS, because I often don't have any other option.
The fact that I work in other languages means I get to see what I like about better-managed ecosystems. If you're writing JS on both frontend and backend and not using anything else, it's likely that you don't know how bad things are for you because the JS churn has been normalized for you.
> That's a problem with your build system then, not React.
Did you read the sentence that you're "correcting"?
> My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.
That's a problem with your build system then, not React. There is (or was) indeed a lot of churn in build systems, but you wouldn't have been spared unless you had chosen to not use a build system - which is still possible with React, but not with Svelte, Vue or Angular.
My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.