Do Frontend Frameworks Still Matter? A Thread
Do frameworks matter anymore?
Aaron Boodman thinks they’ve gone about as far as they’re going to go, according to a June 21 X thread.
Boodman is currently the CEO of Rocicorp, which is building out the sync engine Zero. But he’s worked on more than a few software development projects, including Google Chrome.
Frameworks have “dramatically improved the quality of UI on the web,” he wrote Monday. “But we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. React? Solid? Svelte? Vue? I’m sorry, they are all basically doing the same thing with slightly different tradeoffs and syntax.”
Ouch.
What really needs to change, Boodman wrote, is how communication is handled.
“The core reason web apps suck is because of the constant. request. response. cycle. for. every. interaction. Bleeding away our lives 500ms at a time,” he wrote. “You can paper over this to some extent with useOptimistic()or SWR or client-side state management. But this is the same as trying to build a semi-reactive UI using the DOM directly. You get much more mileage by abstracting that away.”
Sync engines can abstract away some of this, but it’s a harder problem than that, he continued.
“But this is a really hard problem. *Much* harder than another UI framework. “Sync engine” is a polite term that allows you to avoid admitting to yourself (and your investors 😂) that you are building a distributed database,” he added.
This is the future of UI engineering, he added.
Ryan Carniato, who created Solid.js and is generally regarded as a thought leader in JS frameworks, surprisingly did not disagree entirely at this particular point in time.
“I can agree with this generally. I mean, now that we are here. Not 10 years ago, not even 5 years ago,” he wrote. “What we’ve seen is JS frameworks try to extend into this zone and recognize that they only care to be responsible for so much.”
For instance, he wrote, “We can’t assume a server is stateful or has a persistent connection. Or assume that everyone uses the same communication protocol. Server functions are dabbling in this in the most simplistic way in our metaframeworks,” he continued. “As we build more complicated serialization, you can view RSCs as a form of this; we are creating more powerful ways to communicate async data, but at a certain point, we are just recreating sync engines.”
He doesn’t go so far, however, to agree that frameworks no longer matter.
“I see it more as a return to focusing more on what the frameworks were always best at,” he wrote.
Astro Offers New Experimental Live Content
Astro 5.10 introduces a new experimental feature called live content collections, which is for use when data changes frequently or when the site needs to be personalized for the user. Live content collections fetch fresh data on every request.
Astro, a web framework designed for content sites, was updated last week. It’s designed to build fast sites with minimal JavaScript on the client-side.
“This powerful addition allows you to fetch content at runtime instead of build time, opening up new possibilities for dynamic, real-time content,” Astro maintainer Matt Kane wrote in the release blog. Kane explained that live content collections use “a new type of loader that fetches data at runtime.”
“Unlike existing loaders that run during the build process, live loaders execute when users visit your pages, ensuring you always have the latest data,” Kane wrote.
Also in this release, the Astro responsive images feature is now marked stable and the release offers support for customizing the Cloudflare Workers entry point.
OpenAI Supports Reusable Prompts
OpenAI is making it easier to reuse, share, save and just overall manage AI prompts in the API.
Prompts are now an API primitive, meaning developers can manage, version, templatize and optimize prompts in one place, as the company explained in an X thread.
This also makes it easy to use and reuse prompts across the Playground and API. Prompts will also work with Evals and Stored Completions, making it easy to iterate on prompts and track changes like new tools and system messages. With the new Prompt object, the company added, developers can preconfigure tools, models, messages and more without manually copying and pasting. Prompts can also be referenced by ID, including in the Responses API and OpenAI’s SDKs.
In Playground, there’s also a new “Optimize” button to optimize prompts for the API. Playground also supports saving Prompts, including specific versions and configurations, to reuse or share.
Rust-Based Slint Releases Support for 3D Graphics
Slint 1.12 was released last week, which its team is calling one of their most ambitious releases to date, with built-in support for WebGPU (abbreviated as WGPU), a modern graphics API that provides a way to access GPU capabilities across different platforms.
That’s significant because it lets developers integrate 3D graphics and other GPU-accelerated rendering libraries, such as Bevy, directly into Slint apps. Bevy is a Rust-based high-performance game engine built on top of WGPU. (There’s even a demo of Bevy integration.)
“Bevy’s powerful 3D rendering capabilities, combined with Slint’s declarative UI language, enables you to seamlessly integrate 3D into your app,” the team wrote.
Slint is an open source, GUI toolkit designed for building native user interfaces in Rust, C++, JavaScript and Python. It’s used for embedded systems, desktop and mobile platforms.
3D may seem “extra” to some, but the Slint team writes that 3D isn’t just for games anymore.
“We have customers developing medical imaging or in-car infotainment systems with interactive 3D models,” the blog post about the update stated. “Slint’s new WGPU integration opens the door to 3D graphics and integration of other graphical crates in the Rust ecosystem.”
This release also takes steps toward “completing our cross-platform story with the iOS tech-preview,” the team wrote.
“We’re closer than ever to our goal of offering developers a truly unified, efficient, and modern UI toolkit — spanning the full spectrum of platforms — from bare-metal microcontrollers, to Linux and Android, to macOS, Windows, and now iOS,” they wrote.
Web developers can now cross-compile their Rust app to run on iPhones and iPads, thanks to Xcode support and native font rendering with Skia. Python language support is in the works.
This release also offers Figma variables integration.
“With Slint 1.12, you can now import these Figma variables directly into your app, thanks to our new Figma variables integration,” the team wrote. “This closes the gap between design and implementation — making it easier to maintain consistent, theme-aware UIs across your entire project.”
