Is it React itself which is shitty, or the underlying “declarative layout” paradigm? Because I’m a little concerned that SwiftUI was a couple of years late to the party and will be more than a couple of years late leaving it after everyone else has moved on.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112673905913338507

@ratkins in general what's shitty is having leaky abstractions and multiple layers of code. React's problem is not that it's a declarative API, it's that it's a craptonne of 3rd party JavaScript sitting on top of the native DOM.

SwiftUI suffers from this a little bit too, in that parts of it sit on top of UI/AppKit, but at least since it's a first party API, Apple is empowered to cut out some of the inefficiencies.

@nicklockwood I agree that’s the main part of it, but I do wonder about the state management parts of React and friends just being a pile of accidental complexity. Apple quietly took Combine out the back and shot it already, hopefully that’s enough.

@ratkins that's where the leaky abstraction part comes in. Declarative APIs are great until they aren't, and then suddenly working around that seems like 10x the work of solving it with a procedural API

@nicklockwood Right. So that’s where my fear about SwiftUI lies.

@ratkins I think it’s more React jumping the shark, as it were. It accumulated a lot of complexity when trying to also absorb server-side capability, and trying to abstract across client + server has just been IMO a pretty dismal failure.