React hooks always struck me as object-oriented programming reinvented through the back door of functions. We started with pure components, decided we needed state after all, and ended up with magic functions that stash and retrieve state from some hidden context — essentially re-deriving this with worse ergonomics and an implicit ordering contract. Some part of it was the functional language paradigms like immutability that were popular elsewhere at the time bolted on to JavaScript.
What I find refreshing about Gea is that it doesn't fight the language. Stores are classes. Computed values are getters. State mutation is just assignment.
I've been waiting for a framework that embraces the actual paradigms of the language it's written in, rather than inventing a parallel universe of conventions. Excited to try this one.
That said, I'm genuinely curious where the edges are. Was React's complexity accidental due to its architecture or was it the price of solving genuinely hard problems (concurrent rendering, suspense boundaries, fine-grained error recovery) (which by the way most consumers of the library did not care that much about)?
Does Gea's simplicity hold up as apps get complex, or will we eventually hit patterns where the escape hatch is the complexity React already internalized?
One thing I've been very glad for in all the years I've been using TS+Vue is that I'm not forced into JavaScript's craptastical OOP system that was a bolted-on kludge well before ES2015 class syntax was even a thing. Having to use patterns like "foo.bar.bind(foo)" is what I consider fighting the language. Having to know that `this` is something different in an event handler, and thus having to bind it to some other variable, unless of course I use an arrow function, where there is no `this` at all, is fighting the language.
When I use static closures, functions are just functions, closures are closures, things just work. I don't have anything against OOP whatsoever, and I'm even fine with prototype-based OO, but the the way it's done in JS is littered with everything from papercuts to outright landmines. So a framework like WebComponents or this one, that forces me to use JS's OO mechanics, is a non-starter. Of course so are React hooks, which are barkingly insane for completely different reasons.
Thank you for the thorough comments! I wholeheartedly agree. And while I believe React invented most of its problems (mostly because we've been engineering GUI solutions since mid-70's and, as I always say, Excel, the god of all UI apps, shipped in 1985) I also acknowledge modern problems like suspenses that occur as a result of elevated expectations.
Gea is frankly very new, and for example doesn't ship a solution for suspenses or fine-grained error recovery yet. And since noone, including me, built a very complex Gea app yet, we don't exactly know if the simplicity will hold up.
But Gea is the 3rd generation of my frontend frameworks, and I've been building vanilla JS-esque frontends since 2011 (when I released my first library, tartJS). The main feature of a good framework is to contain code complexity as the app grows and I believe as GUI engineers we have some good patterns to flatten the complexity. Gea is just trying to hide repetitive DOM updates behind a compiler, and while it has proven somewhat difficult to account for all the different ways people (or AI) write JavaScript, I'm constantly improving the compiler with new patterns.
That's why Gea ships with several GUI app implementations—my approach is kind of simple. If I can get AI to generate several different UI apps in different domains, I can capture a good enough set of complexities for which I can deliver solutions. I've already fixed tens of bugs that I could only see as a result of building a UI with the library.
Having said that, it's still very early for Gea. I guess only time will tell if we will have to resort to different, non-idiomatic solutions to handle more complex demands. At least the philosophy is very clear—Google built its original web 2.0 apps with Google Closure Library, an imperative UI framework, with lots of repetitive boilerplate. And that was enough to give us maps and google docs, etc., so I am hopeful for the future that we will be able to find idiomatic solutions.
In fact the precedent to Gea, my previous framework erste made use of `pug` tagged template literals! I started with that base, but then decided to ship with JSX instead. This would be a great addition to Gea and would love to see it as a community contribution. I'm hesitant about web components but if we could help web components to feel more "plain old JS" to write, it would be awesome!
I suspect everything about react seems like a backflip to get access to things we kind of needed in the first place.
Reacts complexity I believe are due to the fact that it's an overlay onto a system with high impedance mismatch - only then some degree of inherent complexity.
You can and you can't. There's still plenty of very popular libraries that don't behave correctly with it. That's more on the libraries than on the compiler but that's the current state of things.
React Compiler(originally react-forget) is a build-time tool that automatically optimizes your React app by automatically memoizing your code. It only replaces the manual ceremony of useMemo, useCallback, and React.memo with automatic caching at compile time. So, it's fixing the problem they introduced by React itself or you we can call it a "trade-off" in a sense
Disclaimer: I only read description, did not try to code.
What I like: the smart compiler that determines the actual dependencies, no need to declare them. Apparently the compiler is so smart as to compute the DOM diffs at compile time, which eliminates the need for virtual DOM.
What kills it for me: the two-way binding. The binding should be one-way to preserve your sanity as the project grows. Two-way bindings allow to build highly reactive Ruby Goldberg machines where anything can trigger anything else, and you won't know, because it's just a mutation of a property somewhere, indistinguishable from a non-reactive mutation. Two-way bindings are callback hell squared.
I want one-way data binding, immutability, and basically FRP. The biggest demonstration of FRP's immense real-life success is not React. It's the spreadsheet.
This may be good for small pieces of interactivity. But I likely would go for HTMX for that.
Hi, the author of Gea here. I have a long history of thinking about one- and two-way bindings, and I believe JavaScript as the language has a great solution to this. If you pass an object to a function, it's two-way bound, and if you pass a primitive, it's one-way bound. So I built Gea to replicate this. If users choose to pass an object in a one-way bound scenario, they could create a new object and pass that in, and it would work.
By the way, just as a syntactic sugar, Gea supports function components, too.
Thank you for your project, it's elegant! It's pretty obvious that one-way binding is a two-way binding with one of the roads not taken. I see that e.g. a careful naming scheme could make it obvious what is reactive, and what is not.
OTOH React arrived where it's now not by allowing a particular approach, but by enforcing it.
This clearly AI generated website is such a turn-off.
I get that AI can be good at making websites, and someone might not care to spend a lot of time on it, but a website that looks like a slightly modified version of a generic "make an X landing page" from gpt-5.3-codex doesn't scream "I care about what I just made".
Just go super reductionist like planetscale did and have partially rendered markdown, don't put twinkling stars in the background
As the author... I somewhat agree :) But I really like synthwave and ever since I came across the design trend I wanted to use it somewhere. And I put twinkling stars on purpose, there's even shooting stars if you wait enough. I understand it comes across as generic AI slop, but this is an early project and it will evolve. I will work on a planetscale-style webpage and maybe I can add it as an option you can toggle on :)
Two-way props! Yikes! That was a mess in the first version of Angular. I thought the consensus was that two-way props binding just opened the door to difficult to understand side-effect laden code.
The bindings in Gea work just like in JavaScript. Two-way if an object is passed, one-way if a primitive is passed. I think it's best to stick to the idioms of the underlying language.
I personally agree. But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language. If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent, I believe frameworks should follow this paradigm.
And in the end in Gea developers have full control over this, just in the same way they do in real life. `child({ ...obj })` easily solves this, for example, in both idiomatic JS and in Gea.
You're using various terms to refer to concepts which are similar but distinct, and it's confusing the issue a bit.
> But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language
Languages do not have practices, developers do.
Regarding "idiom": core language features/semantics are not idioms. In programming, "idiom" usually refers to small commonly-used patterns that reside atop the language. "Mutating objects" is not an idiom, if only because I can think of any number of non-idiomatic uses of mutation.
> If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent
JS "allows" mutations on objects to be "reflected" elsewhere, because that's how mutation works. If JS had to support scoped mutability at the language level, the language would be significantly more complex.
But this implies nothing about the value or advisability of using mutation and two-way binding in an application framework. That is a choice on which framework authors usually land on one side or the other.
It seems that by more or less equating "idiom", "practice" and "paradigm", you're opting out of the sorts of choices that not only distinguish web frameworks, but simplify the patterns involved in building with them.
Feel free to question anything you like and I'll help you find the answers.
This is a well-trodden path. All aspects of object mutation and its effects are obvious and well-known. What is pass by ref and what is pass by val is also pretty obvious. One can easily pass in primitive values and not worry about two-way binding if they choose to. One can also easily not mutate any props they receive from their parents. This is already the best practice in eslint for like 10 years. This is not easy, this is trivial.
> But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language. If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent, I believe frameworks should follow this paradigm.
Why? Why should frameworks be beholden to the mutation semantics of the language, particularly with JS where there is no choice of language in the browser? Why should frameworks follow this paradigm?
Because JavaScript _is_ the language and people know it. I never understood the concept of a "React developer", for example, although I saw many junior devs who were very well-versed in React and didn't completely understand JavaScript.
In the end, it's a design choice. Of course frameworks don't inherently _need_ to be beholden to the standards of the underlying language, but I think this is just simpler, therefore a worthy goal to pursue.
Why? Instead of creating an event handler that changes a property you declare same thing as binding. Why this creates more issues than manual event handlers?
Stores and Components are basic classes that don't introduce any new concepts (other than the fact that the JSX goes into the template method of the Component, and that they are reactive behind the scenes). There are no hooks like useState, and the design philosophy is that everything should feel as native and natural as JavaScript.
You are bringing up an important topic. The way I see it is that Gea's Store is a plain old JS class. It's just a native class. There really is no special syntax you need to pay attention to. Whereas Solid signals require you to follow a specific syntax and approach, and has its own gotchas. Like, the language doesn't have a createSignal method by default, and you don't "execute" what look like values in JS as you need to do in Solid, and although I'm looking forward to the official Signal API, Solid isn't following that either.
That's basically how Gea is more native, because stores are plain classes. I hope this clarifies my point a little bit more.
It's just a native class. There really is no special syntax you need to pay attention to.
Don't confuse syntax with code. Solid has no special syntax (other than JSX of course).
This isn't comparing apples to apples.
Solid has a Store primitive too, and it's a "plain old" proxied object.
How is `createStore` less native than `new Store()`? The `new` keyword didn't even exist in JS until 2015, and the underlying semantics (prototypical inheritance) never changed.
One of Solid's design goals is fine-grained reactivity for very high performance. That's why signals are getter functions, because calling them alerts the system to the precise "scope" that will need to be re-run when the value changes.
Since signals are functions, they can be composed easily, and passed around as values.
I'm not following—the `new` keyword has been with us since JavaScript's inception. You might be confusing it with the `class` syntax, but before that we could always `new` functions.
And yes, Solid has signals that require you to know how to write and work with them. I answered another comment on the thread about Solid stores—they also introduce a couple of gotchas and weird syntax. You just can't do `this.users.push(...)` or `this.users[2].loggedIn = true` in Solid stores.
Therefore `createStore` is less native than `new Store()`, because `new Store()` just gives you a plain (proxied) object you can manipulate in various ways and reactivity will persist thanks to the compiler.
And Gea's design goal is also fine-grained reactivity, which it delivers without getter functions in the code that the developer writes, but rather, the handlers are generated via the compiler.
Solid stores are a great improvement over raw signals, but they still come with their own gotchas. First off, it's an entirely new syntax. You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird. In Gea it's just regular JavaScript: `this.users[2].loggedIn = false` or `this.users.push(...)`. MobX also comes with its own syntax.
In the end Gea is basically as simple as a plain old JavaScript class, made reactive by its compiler.
This is a design choice, and explained in their docs:
Separating the read and write capabilities of a store provides a valuable
debugging advantage.
This separation facilitates the tracking and control of the components that
are accessing or changing the values.
> You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird.
It's optional, and incidentally quite expressive and powerful. But they also support mutable drafts out of the box.
import { produce } from 'solid';
setStore(produce(state => {
state.users[2]?.loggedIn = false;
}))
I understand this bit. The bit that I don't understand is how you compare the two invented concepts like `setStore` and `produce` to just `state.users[2]?.loggedIn = false`. To me it's very clear Gea's syntax requires you to write less code, while also requiring you to know less concepts.
The value judgement implied in "invented concepts" is kind of weird, and maybe gets at a core difference in how you and I think about this.
Frameworks have APIs; they define concepts. Learning concepts isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Especially if they are concepts which let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently.
What you mean is that you are leaving it to the user to learn (or conceive of) additional concepts which are external to Gea to in order to build non-trivial reactive applications.
But "Gea requires you to write less code / know fewer concepts" can be reframed as "Gea opts out of solving some types of vanilla JS boilerplate for you". When you don't give your users "concepts", they're still going to end up writing a lot of code and learning concepts, just not within your API.
I see mpalmer counters each specific claim, dashersw shifts to a slightly different argument rather than directly addressing the rebuttal.
One guy is doing the tech founder equivalent of a TED Talk ("my thing is more native and requires fewer concepts!") while another is quietly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and has receipts. One keeps doubling down because this is clearly his baby, while other is just some experienced dev who's watched too many "simple mutable state" frameworks turn into maintenance nightmares.
One person is selling a vision. The other is explaining why that vision has been tried and mostly rejected by the industry for good reasons.
Only one of them is learning from the conversation.
Thank you for the discussion, I find it very interesting and I'd love to understand how you think. Why do you think setStore and produce let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct assignment?
And what kind of types of boilerplate do you see Gea is opting out of?
Let's briefly set aside your belief that because JS supports mutation, a framework should as well.
Immutability and one-way dataflow is an unquestionable productivity win. It eliminates an entire class of complexity, and results in well-defined boundaries for the components of your application. With two-way data binding, those boundaries have to be carefully recognized and preserved by the developer every time they touch the code.
So one place Gea won't save devs any time or grief is in testing. If any part of the app can affect any other part of the app, the surface area of a change very quickly becomes unknowable, and you are only as informed as your tests are thorough. Not boilerplate in the literal sense, but quite a bit of overhead in the form of combinatorial test cases.
Yes, JS has mutability. Yes, you can make two-way data binding work as a framework feature. That you should is an argument I don't think you've successfully made yet.
Let me ask - why do you think JSX lets you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct createElement call?
I see your point. I designed Gea to be one-way binding only first, and then decided to add two-way binding for props passed as objects. People can still easily only use one-way binding. Maybe this becomes a preference in the compiler config?
The argument for Gea to support two-way binding is basically circular and I believe well-made at this point. I want a framework to respect a language. Breaking two-way binding when it's a concept in the underlying language is like breaking Liskov's Substitution Principle. You can do it, but you probably shouldn't.
JSX is more succinct and efficient than raw DOM API because it's declarative, where the raw API is imperative.
> Maybe this becomes a preference in the compiler config?
Maybe, but it could be more complicated for you, the maintainer, than it's worth!
> JSX is more succinct and efficient than raw DOM API because it's declarative, where the raw API is imperative.
But that's also the difference between (e.g.) Solid's signals vs a plain (proxied) object that's passed around and mutated. I'd go so far as to say that mutable objects are one of the most "imperative" things about JS.
I don't want to recurse into philosophy but one could argue an assignment is more declarative than a function call :) Solid is function calls everywhere, and extra code, vs plain objects.
I am pondering about this, but would love to see an example to make it more concrete. The way I see it is that this reactivity is completely on the compiler's side, and there's no more ambiguity or pitfalls than misrepresenting a dependency array in a react hook.
Should an application framework written in Rust encourage the usage of `unsafe` blocks in application code? It certainly allows for more power and flexibility, and it's supported in the language.
Rookie mistake, you just conflating concepts pretending things don't exist. Good API is one that is minimal, explicit and acomplishes the job without conflating with somethings else. Congrats now I don't know if this variable is designed for rendering of state managements and when I will hit some perf issues will have no idea what causes this, same with some unintended state update or something like this. If you can do everything using same concept it's obviously harder to read as you need to simulate compiler in your head which is bad design.
Looks quite cool! I have also considered similar ideas, but have decided to not develop anything. However, there are a few important areas where we have different points of view. My main use cases relate mainly to computationally demanding applications and, thus, runtime performance is quite important.
First, the claim that one gets "reactivity for free" is not entirely true (although the costs may be negligible for many apps). The stores are wrapped in proxies, which lowers the performance of, for example, property access. This is why I rejected the idea of proxies and instead considered generating getters and setters to handle reactivity. This could, in principle, enable zero overhead reads (assuming that all the reactivity stuff were to be handled in the setter). However, this approach fails to account for, for example, array mutations. Thus, I see the point in proxies, but the cost of them can be significantly lowered performance (which may not matter for all applications).
Second, not memoizing computed values (i.e., getters) can also have a significant negative impact on runtime performance, because expensive computations may have to be executed many times. I suppose that caching could be offloaded to the developer, but this could be laborious, at least if the developer would have to keep track of when to invalidate the computation. In, for example, Excel, computed values can be accessed fast, because they are stored in memory (although the added memory usage can become a problem).
Third, you have not addressed async stores or async computed values (as far as I can tell). I will admit that considering async can be quite complicated. However, for better or worse, async is still a key part of JavaScript (e.g., sync alternatives do not exist for all APIs). Thus, the claims "JavaScript is enough", "Zero Concepts" and "You already know the entire API" are slightly imprecise, because async is not supported (although, this does not necessarily matter for many applications).
These three points were the main reasons why I chose not to pursue my similar ideas (especially in the context of computationally demanding applications). Still, I find the idea that JavaScript should be enough for reactivity to be compelling and worthwhile of further development.
Thanks for your insights. I was originally hesitant about the performance of proxies, too, but they turned out to be great. The benchmarks (https://geajs.com/benchmark-report.html) also show good results. Both in terms of memory and CPU cycles, even though proxies are obviously adding an overhead, it's not day and night (https://jsben.ch/proxy-vs-object-performance-benchmark-dtxo6 is a good test for this). With a proxy, you can set a property 25 million times per second (on my M4 Max machine in Safari) with only 4% perf loss vs defineProperty, and Chrome is about half the perf with 20% loss vs defineProperty. So, still, 12.5 million setters per second is pretty good. Of course if your use case demands more performance, nothing beats a hand-optimized vanilla JS code.
Since Gea doesn't rerender the template _at all (well, for the most part, at least)_, in theory we wouldn't really gain much from getter memoization, mainly because we create proxy observers for computed values that update the DOM in place only when the underlying value updates.
And since stores are plain old JS classes, there's no need for an "async store" concept. Just update a value in the store whenever you want, track its loading state however you want, either synchronously or asynchronously, and the observers will take care of them. If you refer to another pattern that I'm not aware of, please let me know.
However, in my simple self written benchmark that compares the time it takes to sum the property values (i.e., getter) of 100 million proxies vs plain objects, the result is that the proxies are 13x slower.
When benchmarking the setting of the property value of the 100 million proxies vs plain objects, the result is that the proxies are 35x slower.
My simple benchmark gives results that significantly deviate from the linked benchmark. Regardless, the relevance of the performance implications of proxies should be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Regarding the memoization, I was primarily referring to accessing the getter multiple times (i.e., not necessarily in DOM rendering), which can cause unnecessary computation in Gea (as far as I can tell). In my envisaged use cases, this could often lead to problems (with, e.g., large data sets).
How would this be accomplished in Gea so that reactivity would be preserved (i.e., mutating store0.url would trigger a new fetch)? Is it possible to "listen" to changes to store0.url and handle the async code?
Very interesting benchmark results... well, I guess that's proxies for you.
Getters in Gea are designed to be used as computed properties by the components' rendering cycles, and in that, they don't need explicit memoization. I believe users can implement their own memoized computed variables if they require repetitive access—in which case each store's `observe` method could be utilized in updating the memoized value whenever a specific value changes in the store.
And for the async case, for now the compiler doesn't handle this scenario. It could be added, but as you expect, for now the same `observe` method could help here as well to listen to changes on store0.url and refetch accordingly.
The contrast of most of the text against the background is not accessible.
I'm not overly impressed with the claim "Faster than Solid" when only figure presented on the hero chart is the geometric average of the Duration scores for each framework.
Digging into the individual metrics, Solid is well within the margin of error on essentially every metric to tie or even beat Gea.
On top of that, Solid beats Gea handily on bundle size, 1:4 uncompressed and 1:2 compressed.
So at best, Gea is a tie on speed with Solid, the bundle is bigger, and even time to first paint is a little worse.
Solid is honestly a beast, and I love it! It was a great challenge to even match its performance, let alone beat it. While on several metrics they are within margin of error, select row, swap rows, remove row, and clear rows performances are significantly better on Gea's side.
Having said that, pure performance wasn't the goal as much as the developer experience. I wanted to build something that felt _native_ to the language.
And thank you for the comment on accessibility—I just updated the website and the docs to make the text more legible.
But all of those metrics differ by something like 1 millisecond, and you've only got benchmark data from an M4 Macbook Pro. On the strength of this, you promise us:
"The fastest compiled UI framework — ahead of Solid, Svelte, Vue, and React."
I know you've put quite a bit of work into the underlying libraries here, but this is the sort of claim people are sure to poke at. Is the Gea code used in the benchmark published anywhere?
It was likely almost entirely AI-generated but there are two oddities:
- MIT — Copyright (c) 2017-present Armagan Amcalar: It would be an interesting bout of hubris to give yourself a copyright that predates the beginning of the project by 9 years.
- The README lists sizes as "kb" rather than "KB": I find it odd that it would get units wrong unless it was specifically instructed to do so?
Hi, the author here. Gea is built upon erste and regie that I released in 2017 and 2019. Hence the copyright. I thought a lot about this, also thought of releasing it as a new version of erste, but it would be too big of a change and re-imagination, and I didn't want to introduce the dichotomy and stress introduced by Angular 2.
Hi, the author of Gea here. Gea is built upon the principles introduced by 11 years of history, based on all of the UI frameworks I have authored so far, the most recent of which are erste and regie from 2017-2019. And Gea itself is written over 6 months, the history of which is compressed in the initial commit as I don't believe in populating Github history with crappy commits that alter design decisions and introduce breaking changes. You can imagine Gea was closed source before the 1.0.0 launch, and made only open at the end.
not the author of the gea but from what I can see in the readme, the ideas go back to 2017, erste.js and regie were earlier versions of the same concept.
Not to knock on the project - it's certainly interesting.
I find it funny that the headline is "JavaSCript is enough" - yet this is a compiler on top of JavaScript that introduces magic and behavioural changes to syntax. How well does this work with testing frameworks? Can this run without the compiler?
A lot of the thinking behind this compiler comes out of the box with Rust. If only wasm worked.
Heh, sorry, I (the author) wasn't the one who created the post. But the idea is reactivity in JS shouldn't require new syntax.
Gea works best with the compiler, I documented a non-compiled (only compiles JSX) browser usage here: https://geajs.com/docs/browser-usage.html but this obviously requires manual store observers and manual DOM updates, which means it's not _really_ benefiting from Gea.
This is one reason Gea has lots of examples in the repository. It's an area of active development—I'm working on adding compiler support for more and more patterns. Basically, since we can analyze the code statically, and follow the dependencies even if they are destructured, we can create proxies or special handlers for each situation. It's a tiring job and unfortunately there's no one global, easy solution, especially as you pointed out, some of these patterns don't work in proxies. But I believe we cover an important base of idiomatic JavaScript right now, and I'm continuing with new releases to improve the compiler's handling on more exotic ways to write JavaScript.
Of course, one down-side of the compiler approach is, for example, if there's a statement you want to make reactive whose signature is only resolved in runtime (like a computed property name) it's practically impossible to wire. But Gea exposes enough of the underlying component structure so it's kind of straightforward for a developer to manually write an observer for these cases, and do the updates to static properties (that are rendered) in runtime.
At first I thought this was using a compiler to figure out data dependencies on regular javascript objects, including built in's on the window and coming from third party dependencies, so you could do this:
<div>window width: {window.innerWidth}</div>
But it's not, it's just on objects that subclass a Store.
This is an interesting idea, though, thanks for bringing it up! I will think about it and try to add it to the compiler. Especially native objects like `window` would be great to create handlers for in the compiler. It would make life really easy for the developer.
Yeah, I experimented with this a while ago, basically compile templates to get their dynamic data dependencies and then poll them for changes, although I did it at runtime. I was able to have thousands of components running with fairly minimal cost, turns out strict equality checks are pretty cheap, although there was issues with defining custom objects or anon functions inside the template. A compiler could be much smarter about this, including nested field access on objects, ignoring temporary objects and functions, and deduping checks so only the minimal amount of values would be polled each frame. Values out of the viewport can "sleep" or be polled on a lower frequency. It's kind of an interesting paradigm because it doesn't require anything on the part of the developer to write their state management in a specific way or to wrap third party dependencies in a reactive wrapper.
Of course polling is not fashionable as it's seen as "crude" or "unoptimised" but typically most UI's only have a few dozen input sources at most visible on a screen, and polling that amount of data amounts to less than a ms even on slower mobile hardware. In extreme cases with thousands of data points the compiler could be smart and "short-circuit" the checks, or the component could opt into manual update calls.
But it's super powerful to have what amounts to true immediate mode UI, the entire issue of state management basically goes away. `window.state` becomes a perfectly viable option haha.
> The Vite plugin analyzes your JSX at build time, figures out which DOM nodes depend on which state, and wires up surgical patches — invisibly.
This part interests me… if it’s able to be brought to React somehow. Too many sites are shipping entirely reactive DOMs where only a tiny minority of content actually changes.
The fact that the entire project appears to have been written in three days, however, gives me some deep doubts.
I wish I could bring it to React! That would save so many developers and so much natural resources!
I've been working on the library for 6 months, and it's built upon my previous libraries tartJS (2011), erste (2017) and regie (2019). I just like to squash my commits before I make a public release, and that just happened 4 days ago :)
hey! Great job on this, dashersw. I‘ve believed for a while now that the compile time dependency analyzer approach is the only good way for frameworks like this. Really neat choices on the API surface as well – so simple! Launching with a headless UI lib is smart. will try both in a side project soon! thanks and cheers!
Thank you! Honestly I tried building a replica of shadcn but that didn't prove to be viable. I thought it would be very difficult for developers to adopt without a first-party UI library so built one on top of Zag.js. And I expect a lot of AI-assisted coding sessions to happen with Gea so I also baked in enough AI skills to enable assistants, as well as migration guides for React. Hopefully these will help onboarding early adopters. Please let us know when you give Gea a try!
I personally don't believe anything can beat hand-built and fine-tuned vanilla JS code, and in the benchmarks we see Gea beating vanilla JS implementation (for example in partial update or swap rows). One reason for this is Gea's compiler has special cases like row swap's to be as minimal calculations and DOM operations as possible. The compiler, also, is evolving to recognize more and more patterns, and compile them into a miniscule overhead.
One thing I borrowed from my earlier library erste is event delegation. Instead of creating event handlers bound to each DOM element (say, in a list render) which is memory-heavy and also consumes a lot of CPU cycles, Gea simply attaches one event listener per type on the body and uses a `.matches()` call to check whether that event applies to a given DOM element. This is one of the main reasons why Gea is so performant—there's no excess/unnecessary memory allocation or CPU cycles. This is also reflected in the benchmark results.
Gea in fact supports regular HTML strings out of the box—that's what the compiler turns the JSX into anyway. However IDE tooling is still in the works for syntax highlighting regular HTML.
What syntax would you prefer from Svelte? Like for hooks / stores, or rendering?
React has its own idioms like hooks, and virtual DOM operations. A developer well-versed in JavaScript and who never saw React before wouldn't know how `useState`, or a `Context` would work. They wouldn't know that components would re-evaluate and re-render all the time. They also wouldn't know they shouldn't put useState inside a conditional statement. They wouldn't know they would need a useEffect, or that it depends on an array to declare its dependencies.
Vanilla JS, on the other hand, requires a good knowledge of DOM APIs.
Gea tries to be as close to plain old JavaScript as possible, the way we write it on the backend. The only necessary notion is that everything is reactive and DOM will update automatically as component/store members change.
Thank you! It's the author here. I thought hard about this, and one angle Gea is bringing is that the old is new again, that's why I harkened to a retro style. I also just plain love synthwave, so... :) but you are right, and as Gea matures I believe we will iterate on the homepage.
Bro, is there anything you haven't thought hard about? I read throughout the thread and the answers sound really LLM-y. Although these days we might be calling wolf about gusts of wind.
Heh, sorry it comes across as LLM-y, honest and human-written answers here only. I'm tired of AI slop as much as the next guy, but, yes, I _really_ took my time with Gea. I've been working on writing JS frameworks for 15 years, this is actually the 3rd generation of similar ideas, following tartJS (2011) and erste & regie (2017-2019). It took me several years to solidify what I expect from this generation, and I've been working on Gea for the past six months. That's why I thought about and evaluated many aspects raised here.
not the author of the gea but from what I can see in the readme, the ideas go back to 2017, erste.js and regie were earlier versions of the same concept.
React hooks always struck me as object-oriented programming reinvented through the back door of functions. We started with pure components, decided we needed state after all, and ended up with magic functions that stash and retrieve state from some hidden context — essentially re-deriving this with worse ergonomics and an implicit ordering contract. Some part of it was the functional language paradigms like immutability that were popular elsewhere at the time bolted on to JavaScript.
What I find refreshing about Gea is that it doesn't fight the language. Stores are classes. Computed values are getters. State mutation is just assignment. I've been waiting for a framework that embraces the actual paradigms of the language it's written in, rather than inventing a parallel universe of conventions. Excited to try this one.
That said, I'm genuinely curious where the edges are. Was React's complexity accidental due to its architecture or was it the price of solving genuinely hard problems (concurrent rendering, suspense boundaries, fine-grained error recovery) (which by the way most consumers of the library did not care that much about)?
Does Gea's simplicity hold up as apps get complex, or will we eventually hit patterns where the escape hatch is the complexity React already internalized?
One thing I've been very glad for in all the years I've been using TS+Vue is that I'm not forced into JavaScript's craptastical OOP system that was a bolted-on kludge well before ES2015 class syntax was even a thing. Having to use patterns like "foo.bar.bind(foo)" is what I consider fighting the language. Having to know that `this` is something different in an event handler, and thus having to bind it to some other variable, unless of course I use an arrow function, where there is no `this` at all, is fighting the language.
When I use static closures, functions are just functions, closures are closures, things just work. I don't have anything against OOP whatsoever, and I'm even fine with prototype-based OO, but the the way it's done in JS is littered with everything from papercuts to outright landmines. So a framework like WebComponents or this one, that forces me to use JS's OO mechanics, is a non-starter. Of course so are React hooks, which are barkingly insane for completely different reasons.
Thank you for the thorough comments! I wholeheartedly agree. And while I believe React invented most of its problems (mostly because we've been engineering GUI solutions since mid-70's and, as I always say, Excel, the god of all UI apps, shipped in 1985) I also acknowledge modern problems like suspenses that occur as a result of elevated expectations.
Gea is frankly very new, and for example doesn't ship a solution for suspenses or fine-grained error recovery yet. And since noone, including me, built a very complex Gea app yet, we don't exactly know if the simplicity will hold up.
But Gea is the 3rd generation of my frontend frameworks, and I've been building vanilla JS-esque frontends since 2011 (when I released my first library, tartJS). The main feature of a good framework is to contain code complexity as the app grows and I believe as GUI engineers we have some good patterns to flatten the complexity. Gea is just trying to hide repetitive DOM updates behind a compiler, and while it has proven somewhat difficult to account for all the different ways people (or AI) write JavaScript, I'm constantly improving the compiler with new patterns.
That's why Gea ships with several GUI app implementations—my approach is kind of simple. If I can get AI to generate several different UI apps in different domains, I can capture a good enough set of complexities for which I can deliver solutions. I've already fixed tens of bugs that I could only see as a result of building a UI with the library.
Having said that, it's still very early for Gea. I guess only time will tell if we will have to resort to different, non-idiomatic solutions to handle more complex demands. At least the philosophy is very clear—Google built its original web 2.0 apps with Google Closure Library, an imperative UI framework, with lots of repetitive boilerplate. And that was enough to give us maps and google docs, etc., so I am hopeful for the future that we will be able to find idiomatic solutions.
Would love to se tagged template Literals and w eb components as first citizen in this - lit.dev etc.
In fact the precedent to Gea, my previous framework erste made use of `pug` tagged template literals! I started with that base, but then decided to ship with JSX instead. This would be a great addition to Gea and would love to see it as a community contribution. I'm hesitant about web components but if we could help web components to feel more "plain old JS" to write, it would be awesome!
Thoughtful.
I suspect everything about react seems like a backflip to get access to things we kind of needed in the first place.
Reacts complexity I believe are due to the fact that it's an overlay onto a system with high impedance mismatch - only then some degree of inherent complexity.
You can now use React Compiler and there would be no virtual DOM.
Already being used in production at large code bases.
The React Compiler does not remove the virtual DOM. You literally cannot use React without a virtual DOM.
You can and you can't. There's still plenty of very popular libraries that don't behave correctly with it. That's more on the libraries than on the compiler but that's the current state of things.
I genuinely don't know what lead to the compilers when we already had a simpler concept of signals.
React Compiler(originally react-forget) is a build-time tool that automatically optimizes your React app by automatically memoizing your code. It only replaces the manual ceremony of useMemo, useCallback, and React.memo with automatic caching at compile time. So, it's fixing the problem they introduced by React itself or you we can call it a "trade-off" in a sense
Yeah afaik React Compiler doesn't really replace virtual DOM.
Disclaimer: I only read description, did not try to code.
What I like: the smart compiler that determines the actual dependencies, no need to declare them. Apparently the compiler is so smart as to compute the DOM diffs at compile time, which eliminates the need for virtual DOM.
What kills it for me: the two-way binding. The binding should be one-way to preserve your sanity as the project grows. Two-way bindings allow to build highly reactive Ruby Goldberg machines where anything can trigger anything else, and you won't know, because it's just a mutation of a property somewhere, indistinguishable from a non-reactive mutation. Two-way bindings are callback hell squared.
I want one-way data binding, immutability, and basically FRP. The biggest demonstration of FRP's immense real-life success is not React. It's the spreadsheet.
This may be good for small pieces of interactivity. But I likely would go for HTMX for that.
Hi, the author of Gea here. I have a long history of thinking about one- and two-way bindings, and I believe JavaScript as the language has a great solution to this. If you pass an object to a function, it's two-way bound, and if you pass a primitive, it's one-way bound. So I built Gea to replicate this. If users choose to pass an object in a one-way bound scenario, they could create a new object and pass that in, and it would work.
By the way, just as a syntactic sugar, Gea supports function components, too.
Thank you for your project, it's elegant! It's pretty obvious that one-way binding is a two-way binding with one of the roads not taken. I see that e.g. a careful naming scheme could make it obvious what is reactive, and what is not.
OTOH React arrived where it's now not by allowing a particular approach, but by enforcing it.
This clearly AI generated website is such a turn-off.
I get that AI can be good at making websites, and someone might not care to spend a lot of time on it, but a website that looks like a slightly modified version of a generic "make an X landing page" from gpt-5.3-codex doesn't scream "I care about what I just made".
Just go super reductionist like planetscale did and have partially rendered markdown, don't put twinkling stars in the background
As the author... I somewhat agree :) But I really like synthwave and ever since I came across the design trend I wanted to use it somewhere. And I put twinkling stars on purpose, there's even shooting stars if you wait enough. I understand it comes across as generic AI slop, but this is an early project and it will evolve. I will work on a planetscale-style webpage and maybe I can add it as an option you can toggle on :)
Two-way props! Yikes! That was a mess in the first version of Angular. I thought the consensus was that two-way props binding just opened the door to difficult to understand side-effect laden code.
The bindings in Gea work just like in JavaScript. Two-way if an object is passed, one-way if a primitive is passed. I think it's best to stick to the idioms of the underlying language.
I don’t know if I’d call it an idiom — rather I’d argue that in modern JavaScript, mutating passed objects is often an anti-pattern.
I personally agree. But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language. If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent, I believe frameworks should follow this paradigm.
And in the end in Gea developers have full control over this, just in the same way they do in real life. `child({ ...obj })` easily solves this, for example, in both idiomatic JS and in Gea.
You're using various terms to refer to concepts which are similar but distinct, and it's confusing the issue a bit.
> But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language
Languages do not have practices, developers do.
Regarding "idiom": core language features/semantics are not idioms. In programming, "idiom" usually refers to small commonly-used patterns that reside atop the language. "Mutating objects" is not an idiom, if only because I can think of any number of non-idiomatic uses of mutation.
> If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent
JS "allows" mutations on objects to be "reflected" elsewhere, because that's how mutation works. If JS had to support scoped mutability at the language level, the language would be significantly more complex.
But this implies nothing about the value or advisability of using mutation and two-way binding in an application framework. That is a choice on which framework authors usually land on one side or the other.
It seems that by more or less equating "idiom", "practice" and "paradigm", you're opting out of the sorts of choices that not only distinguish web frameworks, but simplify the patterns involved in building with them.
[dead]
> `child({ ...obj })` easily solves this, for example
Spreading doesn't prevent you from mutating nested fields. The fact that you think this is an easy problem puts all your other choices under question.
Feel free to question anything you like and I'll help you find the answers.
This is a well-trodden path. All aspects of object mutation and its effects are obvious and well-known. What is pass by ref and what is pass by val is also pretty obvious. One can easily pass in primitive values and not worry about two-way binding if they choose to. One can also easily not mutate any props they receive from their parents. This is already the best practice in eslint for like 10 years. This is not easy, this is trivial.
I'd rather see some real concerns.
> But the default expectation (and therefore the design) should follow the practices of the language. If JS allows mutations on the objects passed to a function to be reflected on the parent, I believe frameworks should follow this paradigm.
Why? Why should frameworks be beholden to the mutation semantics of the language, particularly with JS where there is no choice of language in the browser? Why should frameworks follow this paradigm?
Because JavaScript _is_ the language and people know it. I never understood the concept of a "React developer", for example, although I saw many junior devs who were very well-versed in React and didn't completely understand JavaScript.
In the end, it's a design choice. Of course frameworks don't inherently _need_ to be beholden to the standards of the underlying language, but I think this is just simpler, therefore a worthy goal to pursue.
[dead]
Two way props make for a nice demo, but are a nightmare to maintain.
Why? Instead of creating an event handler that changes a property you declare same thing as binding. Why this creates more issues than manual event handlers?
> Solid has signals and createEffect... Gea takes a different path. It introduces no new concepts at all.
proceeds to introduce Stores and Components
what makes this magically easier than Solid, or any other Proxy-based reactive store frameworks?
Stores and Components are basic classes that don't introduce any new concepts (other than the fact that the JSX goes into the template method of the Component, and that they are reactive behind the scenes). There are no hooks like useState, and the design philosophy is that everything should feel as native and natural as JavaScript.
you continue to contradict yourself by introducing concepts and saying they are not concepts.
I get what you're trying to say, that React hooks have special semantics, and that your abstraction feels more "native".
again, not sure how this is more "native" than Solid signals, just as an example.
You are bringing up an important topic. The way I see it is that Gea's Store is a plain old JS class. It's just a native class. There really is no special syntax you need to pay attention to. Whereas Solid signals require you to follow a specific syntax and approach, and has its own gotchas. Like, the language doesn't have a createSignal method by default, and you don't "execute" what look like values in JS as you need to do in Solid, and although I'm looking forward to the official Signal API, Solid isn't following that either.
That's basically how Gea is more native, because stores are plain classes. I hope this clarifies my point a little bit more.
This isn't comparing apples to apples.
Solid has a Store primitive too, and it's a "plain old" proxied object.
How is `createStore` less native than `new Store()`? The `new` keyword didn't even exist in JS until 2015, and the underlying semantics (prototypical inheritance) never changed.
One of Solid's design goals is fine-grained reactivity for very high performance. That's why signals are getter functions, because calling them alerts the system to the precise "scope" that will need to be re-run when the value changes.
Since signals are functions, they can be composed easily, and passed around as values.
I'm not following—the `new` keyword has been with us since JavaScript's inception. You might be confusing it with the `class` syntax, but before that we could always `new` functions.
And yes, Solid has signals that require you to know how to write and work with them. I answered another comment on the thread about Solid stores—they also introduce a couple of gotchas and weird syntax. You just can't do `this.users.push(...)` or `this.users[2].loggedIn = true` in Solid stores.
Therefore `createStore` is less native than `new Store()`, because `new Store()` just gives you a plain (proxied) object you can manipulate in various ways and reactivity will persist thanks to the compiler.
And Gea's design goal is also fine-grained reactivity, which it delivers without getter functions in the code that the developer writes, but rather, the handlers are generated via the compiler.
What is the difference between mobx or solid stores or any of the reactive frameworks that do reactivity on proxy objects?
Solid stores are a great improvement over raw signals, but they still come with their own gotchas. First off, it's an entirely new syntax. You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird. In Gea it's just regular JavaScript: `this.users[2].loggedIn = false` or `this.users.push(...)`. MobX also comes with its own syntax.
In the end Gea is basically as simple as a plain old JavaScript class, made reactive by its compiler.
> You always have to use setStore
This is a design choice, and explained in their docs:
> You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird.It's optional, and incidentally quite expressive and powerful. But they also support mutable drafts out of the box.
I understand this bit. The bit that I don't understand is how you compare the two invented concepts like `setStore` and `produce` to just `state.users[2]?.loggedIn = false`. To me it's very clear Gea's syntax requires you to write less code, while also requiring you to know less concepts.
The value judgement implied in "invented concepts" is kind of weird, and maybe gets at a core difference in how you and I think about this.
Frameworks have APIs; they define concepts. Learning concepts isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Especially if they are concepts which let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently.
What you mean is that you are leaving it to the user to learn (or conceive of) additional concepts which are external to Gea to in order to build non-trivial reactive applications.
But "Gea requires you to write less code / know fewer concepts" can be reframed as "Gea opts out of solving some types of vanilla JS boilerplate for you". When you don't give your users "concepts", they're still going to end up writing a lot of code and learning concepts, just not within your API.
I see mpalmer counters each specific claim, dashersw shifts to a slightly different argument rather than directly addressing the rebuttal.
One guy is doing the tech founder equivalent of a TED Talk ("my thing is more native and requires fewer concepts!") while another is quietly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and has receipts. One keeps doubling down because this is clearly his baby, while other is just some experienced dev who's watched too many "simple mutable state" frameworks turn into maintenance nightmares. One person is selling a vision. The other is explaining why that vision has been tried and mostly rejected by the industry for good reasons.
Only one of them is learning from the conversation.
Yeah, sure :)
This content is generally unwelcome and appears to be generated, which is against HN commenting rules.
Thank you for the discussion, I find it very interesting and I'd love to understand how you think. Why do you think setStore and produce let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct assignment?
And what kind of types of boilerplate do you see Gea is opting out of?
Let's briefly set aside your belief that because JS supports mutation, a framework should as well.
Immutability and one-way dataflow is an unquestionable productivity win. It eliminates an entire class of complexity, and results in well-defined boundaries for the components of your application. With two-way data binding, those boundaries have to be carefully recognized and preserved by the developer every time they touch the code.
So one place Gea won't save devs any time or grief is in testing. If any part of the app can affect any other part of the app, the surface area of a change very quickly becomes unknowable, and you are only as informed as your tests are thorough. Not boilerplate in the literal sense, but quite a bit of overhead in the form of combinatorial test cases.
Yes, JS has mutability. Yes, you can make two-way data binding work as a framework feature. That you should is an argument I don't think you've successfully made yet.
Let me ask - why do you think JSX lets you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct createElement call?
I see your point. I designed Gea to be one-way binding only first, and then decided to add two-way binding for props passed as objects. People can still easily only use one-way binding. Maybe this becomes a preference in the compiler config?
The argument for Gea to support two-way binding is basically circular and I believe well-made at this point. I want a framework to respect a language. Breaking two-way binding when it's a concept in the underlying language is like breaking Liskov's Substitution Principle. You can do it, but you probably shouldn't.
JSX is more succinct and efficient than raw DOM API because it's declarative, where the raw API is imperative.
> Maybe this becomes a preference in the compiler config?
Maybe, but it could be more complicated for you, the maintainer, than it's worth!
> JSX is more succinct and efficient than raw DOM API because it's declarative, where the raw API is imperative.
But that's also the difference between (e.g.) Solid's signals vs a plain (proxied) object that's passed around and mutated. I'd go so far as to say that mutable objects are one of the most "imperative" things about JS.
I don't want to recurse into philosophy but one could argue an assignment is more declarative than a function call :) Solid is function calls everywhere, and extra code, vs plain objects.
Plain objects whose accessors contain nontrivial logic deferred using function calls - to be fair
I am pondering about this, but would love to see an example to make it more concrete. The way I see it is that this reactivity is completely on the compiler's side, and there's no more ambiguity or pitfalls than misrepresenting a dependency array in a react hook.
Should an application framework written in Rust encourage the usage of `unsafe` blocks in application code? It certainly allows for more power and flexibility, and it's supported in the language.
Rookie mistake, you just conflating concepts pretending things don't exist. Good API is one that is minimal, explicit and acomplishes the job without conflating with somethings else. Congrats now I don't know if this variable is designed for rendering of state managements and when I will hit some perf issues will have no idea what causes this, same with some unintended state update or something like this. If you can do everything using same concept it's obviously harder to read as you need to simulate compiler in your head which is bad design.
Looks quite cool! I have also considered similar ideas, but have decided to not develop anything. However, there are a few important areas where we have different points of view. My main use cases relate mainly to computationally demanding applications and, thus, runtime performance is quite important.
First, the claim that one gets "reactivity for free" is not entirely true (although the costs may be negligible for many apps). The stores are wrapped in proxies, which lowers the performance of, for example, property access. This is why I rejected the idea of proxies and instead considered generating getters and setters to handle reactivity. This could, in principle, enable zero overhead reads (assuming that all the reactivity stuff were to be handled in the setter). However, this approach fails to account for, for example, array mutations. Thus, I see the point in proxies, but the cost of them can be significantly lowered performance (which may not matter for all applications).
Second, not memoizing computed values (i.e., getters) can also have a significant negative impact on runtime performance, because expensive computations may have to be executed many times. I suppose that caching could be offloaded to the developer, but this could be laborious, at least if the developer would have to keep track of when to invalidate the computation. In, for example, Excel, computed values can be accessed fast, because they are stored in memory (although the added memory usage can become a problem).
Third, you have not addressed async stores or async computed values (as far as I can tell). I will admit that considering async can be quite complicated. However, for better or worse, async is still a key part of JavaScript (e.g., sync alternatives do not exist for all APIs). Thus, the claims "JavaScript is enough", "Zero Concepts" and "You already know the entire API" are slightly imprecise, because async is not supported (although, this does not necessarily matter for many applications).
These three points were the main reasons why I chose not to pursue my similar ideas (especially in the context of computationally demanding applications). Still, I find the idea that JavaScript should be enough for reactivity to be compelling and worthwhile of further development.
Thanks for your insights. I was originally hesitant about the performance of proxies, too, but they turned out to be great. The benchmarks (https://geajs.com/benchmark-report.html) also show good results. Both in terms of memory and CPU cycles, even though proxies are obviously adding an overhead, it's not day and night (https://jsben.ch/proxy-vs-object-performance-benchmark-dtxo6 is a good test for this). With a proxy, you can set a property 25 million times per second (on my M4 Max machine in Safari) with only 4% perf loss vs defineProperty, and Chrome is about half the perf with 20% loss vs defineProperty. So, still, 12.5 million setters per second is pretty good. Of course if your use case demands more performance, nothing beats a hand-optimized vanilla JS code.
Since Gea doesn't rerender the template _at all (well, for the most part, at least)_, in theory we wouldn't really gain much from getter memoization, mainly because we create proxy observers for computed values that update the DOM in place only when the underlying value updates.
And since stores are plain old JS classes, there's no need for an "async store" concept. Just update a value in the store whenever you want, track its loading state however you want, either synchronously or asynchronously, and the observers will take care of them. If you refer to another pattern that I'm not aware of, please let me know.
On my computer, the linked benchmark gives the following results.
Object.defineProperty getter: 82M ops/sec, Proxy getter 32M ops/sec => proxy get is 2.56x slower.
Object.defineProperty setter: 14M ops/sec, Proxy setter: 12M ops/sec => proxy is 1.17x slower.
However, in my simple self written benchmark that compares the time it takes to sum the property values (i.e., getter) of 100 million proxies vs plain objects, the result is that the proxies are 13x slower.
When benchmarking the setting of the property value of the 100 million proxies vs plain objects, the result is that the proxies are 35x slower.
My simple benchmark gives results that significantly deviate from the linked benchmark. Regardless, the relevance of the performance implications of proxies should be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Regarding the memoization, I was primarily referring to accessing the getter multiple times (i.e., not necessarily in DOM rendering), which can cause unnecessary computation in Gea (as far as I can tell). In my envisaged use cases, this could often lead to problems (with, e.g., large data sets).
My issues with async mainly relates to developer convenience (i.e., managing the async stuff can be cumbersome). For example, one can use await in a top-level module statement, but not in a class getter. There has been some relevant discussions about this in the context of Svelte, see, e.g., https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/discussions/15845, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dATE70wlHc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-1pVKUWlOQ.
Consider this conceptual example (i.e., async computed value):
How would this be accomplished in Gea so that reactivity would be preserved (i.e., mutating store0.url would trigger a new fetch)? Is it possible to "listen" to changes to store0.url and handle the async code?Very interesting benchmark results... well, I guess that's proxies for you.
Getters in Gea are designed to be used as computed properties by the components' rendering cycles, and in that, they don't need explicit memoization. I believe users can implement their own memoized computed variables if they require repetitive access—in which case each store's `observe` method could be utilized in updating the memoized value whenever a specific value changes in the store.
And for the async case, for now the compiler doesn't handle this scenario. It could be added, but as you expect, for now the same `observe` method could help here as well to listen to changes on store0.url and refetch accordingly.
The contrast of most of the text against the background is not accessible.
I'm not overly impressed with the claim "Faster than Solid" when only figure presented on the hero chart is the geometric average of the Duration scores for each framework.
Digging into the individual metrics, Solid is well within the margin of error on essentially every metric to tie or even beat Gea.
On top of that, Solid beats Gea handily on bundle size, 1:4 uncompressed and 1:2 compressed.
So at best, Gea is a tie on speed with Solid, the bundle is bigger, and even time to first paint is a little worse.
Solid is honestly a beast, and I love it! It was a great challenge to even match its performance, let alone beat it. While on several metrics they are within margin of error, select row, swap rows, remove row, and clear rows performances are significantly better on Gea's side.
Having said that, pure performance wasn't the goal as much as the developer experience. I wanted to build something that felt _native_ to the language.
And thank you for the comment on accessibility—I just updated the website and the docs to make the text more legible.
It's impressive for sure!
But all of those metrics differ by something like 1 millisecond, and you've only got benchmark data from an M4 Macbook Pro. On the strength of this, you promise us:
"The fastest compiled UI framework — ahead of Solid, Svelte, Vue, and React."
I know you've put quite a bit of work into the underlying libraries here, but this is the sort of claim people are sure to poke at. Is the Gea code used in the benchmark published anywhere?
Thank you! And you are right. I hadn't submitted it to the original js-framework-benchmark repo yet, but I just added the benchmark code on gea's repo. You can find it on https://github.com/dashersw/gea/blob/main/benchmark/src/benc..., and the store on https://github.com/dashersw/gea/blob/main/benchmark/src/stor...
You wrote and shipped this in three days, eh?
It was likely almost entirely AI-generated but there are two oddities:
- MIT — Copyright (c) 2017-present Armagan Amcalar: It would be an interesting bout of hubris to give yourself a copyright that predates the beginning of the project by 9 years.
- The README lists sizes as "kb" rather than "KB": I find it odd that it would get units wrong unless it was specifically instructed to do so?
That is a remarkably pedantic nitpick. If you're going that far, you should really be complaining that it's not "KiB".
I don't think it's pedantry, it's looking for clues as to the age of this.
nah, it's pedantic
Hi, the author here. Gea is built upon erste and regie that I released in 2017 and 2019. Hence the copyright. I thought a lot about this, also thought of releasing it as a new version of erste, but it would be too big of a change and re-imagination, and I didn't want to introduce the dichotomy and stress introduced by Angular 2.
Hi, the author of Gea here. Gea is built upon the principles introduced by 11 years of history, based on all of the UI frameworks I have authored so far, the most recent of which are erste and regie from 2017-2019. And Gea itself is written over 6 months, the history of which is compressed in the initial commit as I don't believe in populating Github history with crappy commits that alter design decisions and introduce breaking changes. You can imagine Gea was closed source before the 1.0.0 launch, and made only open at the end.
not the author of the gea but from what I can see in the readme, the ideas go back to 2017, erste.js and regie were earlier versions of the same concept.
https://github.com/dashersw/erste https://github.com/dashersw/regie
Not to knock on the project - it's certainly interesting.
I find it funny that the headline is "JavaSCript is enough" - yet this is a compiler on top of JavaScript that introduces magic and behavioural changes to syntax. How well does this work with testing frameworks? Can this run without the compiler?
A lot of the thinking behind this compiler comes out of the box with Rust. If only wasm worked.
Heh, sorry, I (the author) wasn't the one who created the post. But the idea is reactivity in JS shouldn't require new syntax.
Gea works best with the compiler, I documented a non-compiled (only compiles JSX) browser usage here: https://geajs.com/docs/browser-usage.html but this obviously requires manual store observers and manual DOM updates, which means it's not _really_ benefiting from Gea.
There are many ways to write JavaScript, for example by destructuring variables, etc. How do Gea proxies work to retain reactivity then?
This is one reason Gea has lots of examples in the repository. It's an area of active development—I'm working on adding compiler support for more and more patterns. Basically, since we can analyze the code statically, and follow the dependencies even if they are destructured, we can create proxies or special handlers for each situation. It's a tiring job and unfortunately there's no one global, easy solution, especially as you pointed out, some of these patterns don't work in proxies. But I believe we cover an important base of idiomatic JavaScript right now, and I'm continuing with new releases to improve the compiler's handling on more exotic ways to write JavaScript.
Of course, one down-side of the compiler approach is, for example, if there's a statement you want to make reactive whose signature is only resolved in runtime (like a computed property name) it's practically impossible to wire. But Gea exposes enough of the underlying component structure so it's kind of straightforward for a developer to manually write an observer for these cases, and do the updates to static properties (that are rendered) in runtime.
Hope this clarifies the approach.
At first I thought this was using a compiler to figure out data dependencies on regular javascript objects, including built in's on the window and coming from third party dependencies, so you could do this:
But it's not, it's just on objects that subclass a Store.This is an interesting idea, though, thanks for bringing it up! I will think about it and try to add it to the compiler. Especially native objects like `window` would be great to create handlers for in the compiler. It would make life really easy for the developer.
Yeah, I experimented with this a while ago, basically compile templates to get their dynamic data dependencies and then poll them for changes, although I did it at runtime. I was able to have thousands of components running with fairly minimal cost, turns out strict equality checks are pretty cheap, although there was issues with defining custom objects or anon functions inside the template. A compiler could be much smarter about this, including nested field access on objects, ignoring temporary objects and functions, and deduping checks so only the minimal amount of values would be polled each frame. Values out of the viewport can "sleep" or be polled on a lower frequency. It's kind of an interesting paradigm because it doesn't require anything on the part of the developer to write their state management in a specific way or to wrap third party dependencies in a reactive wrapper.
Of course polling is not fashionable as it's seen as "crude" or "unoptimised" but typically most UI's only have a few dozen input sources at most visible on a screen, and polling that amount of data amounts to less than a ms even on slower mobile hardware. In extreme cases with thousands of data points the compiler could be smart and "short-circuit" the checks, or the component could opt into manual update calls.
But it's super powerful to have what amounts to true immediate mode UI, the entire issue of state management basically goes away. `window.state` becomes a perfectly viable option haha.
Anyways, cool framework.
> The Vite plugin analyzes your JSX at build time, figures out which DOM nodes depend on which state, and wires up surgical patches — invisibly.
This part interests me… if it’s able to be brought to React somehow. Too many sites are shipping entirely reactive DOMs where only a tiny minority of content actually changes.
The fact that the entire project appears to have been written in three days, however, gives me some deep doubts.
I wish I could bring it to React! That would save so many developers and so much natural resources!
I've been working on the library for 6 months, and it's built upon my previous libraries tartJS (2011), erste (2017) and regie (2019). I just like to squash my commits before I make a public release, and that just happened 4 days ago :)
I click, then I see an AI generated website, and AI generated pixelart. Then I leave.
Nobody is sad about that.
I am
hey! Great job on this, dashersw. I‘ve believed for a while now that the compile time dependency analyzer approach is the only good way for frameworks like this. Really neat choices on the API surface as well – so simple! Launching with a headless UI lib is smart. will try both in a side project soon! thanks and cheers!
Thank you! Honestly I tried building a replica of shadcn but that didn't prove to be viable. I thought it would be very difficult for developers to adopt without a first-party UI library so built one on top of Zag.js. And I expect a lot of AI-assisted coding sessions to happen with Gea so I also baked in enough AI skills to enable assistants, as well as migration guides for React. Hopefully these will help onboarding early adopters. Please let us know when you give Gea a try!
How does this thing run so close to VanillaJS without carrying any extra baggage along for the ride?
I personally don't believe anything can beat hand-built and fine-tuned vanilla JS code, and in the benchmarks we see Gea beating vanilla JS implementation (for example in partial update or swap rows). One reason for this is Gea's compiler has special cases like row swap's to be as minimal calculations and DOM operations as possible. The compiler, also, is evolving to recognize more and more patterns, and compile them into a miniscule overhead.
One thing I borrowed from my earlier library erste is event delegation. Instead of creating event handlers bound to each DOM element (say, in a list render) which is memory-heavy and also consumes a lot of CPU cycles, Gea simply attaches one event listener per type on the body and uses a `.matches()` call to check whether that event applies to a given DOM element. This is one of the main reasons why Gea is so performant—there's no excess/unnecessary memory allocation or CPU cycles. This is also reflected in the benchmark results.
Thank you for your detailed answer!
GJ one your library
One random recommendation I could give based on my experimentations on both firefox and chromium
you can attach symbol based custom properties to each such dom node 'class'
and apart from using .matches(), symbol attribute check. this outperforms class based equality checks by a small margin.
very marginal but hey, you are clearly tryharding.
Thank you! Very interesting insight—I'll have a look.
- would be nice if it wasnt using JSX
- would have preferred a syntax like svelte
Gea in fact supports regular HTML strings out of the box—that's what the compiler turns the JSX into anyway. However IDE tooling is still in the works for syntax highlighting regular HTML.
What syntax would you prefer from Svelte? Like for hooks / stores, or rendering?
React is just JavaScript. Also vanilla JavaScript is just JavaScript
React has its own idioms like hooks, and virtual DOM operations. A developer well-versed in JavaScript and who never saw React before wouldn't know how `useState`, or a `Context` would work. They wouldn't know that components would re-evaluate and re-render all the time. They also wouldn't know they shouldn't put useState inside a conditional statement. They wouldn't know they would need a useEffect, or that it depends on an array to declare its dependencies.
Vanilla JS, on the other hand, requires a good knowledge of DOM APIs.
Gea tries to be as close to plain old JavaScript as possible, the way we write it on the backend. The only necessary notion is that everything is reactive and DOM will update automatically as component/store members change.
Not being able to call a function inside if block or a loop is not just javascript.
How do you pronounce it?
It's like get-ah (but without the t).
Not a JS dev but the site need to move away from tinted retro look if you want to stress the modernness.
Thank you! It's the author here. I thought hard about this, and one angle Gea is bringing is that the old is new again, that's why I harkened to a retro style. I also just plain love synthwave, so... :) but you are right, and as Gea matures I believe we will iterate on the homepage.
Bro, is there anything you haven't thought hard about? I read throughout the thread and the answers sound really LLM-y. Although these days we might be calling wolf about gusts of wind.
Great framework tho. Awesome job.
Heh, sorry it comes across as LLM-y, honest and human-written answers here only. I'm tired of AI slop as much as the next guy, but, yes, I _really_ took my time with Gea. I've been working on writing JS frameworks for 15 years, this is actually the 3rd generation of similar ideas, following tartJS (2011) and erste & regie (2017-2019). It took me several years to solidify what I expect from this generation, and I've been working on Gea for the past six months. That's why I thought about and evaluated many aspects raised here.
And thank you!
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
No it's not. Stop upvoting AI slop.
not the author of the gea but from what I can see in the readme, the ideas go back to 2017, erste.js and regie were earlier versions of the same concept.
https://github.com/dashersw/erste https://github.com/dashersw/regie
[flagged]