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0 pointsspankalee1mo ago0 comments

The point of Lit is not to compete with React itself, but to build interoperable web components. If your app (Hi Beaker!) is only using one library/framework, and will only ever one one in eternity, then interoperability might not be a big concern. But if you're building components for multiple teams, mixing components from multiple teams, or ever deal with migrations, then interoperability might be hugely important.

Even so, Lit is widely used to build very complex apps (Beaker, as you know, Photoshop, Reddit, Home Assistant, Microsoft App Store, SpaceX things, ...).

Property bindings are just as ergonomic as attributes with the .foo= syntax, and tag name declaration has rarely come up as a big friction point, especially with the declarative @customElement() decorator. The rest is indeed like a faster less proprietary React in many ways.

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_heimdall1mo ago

Kind of? Lit does add some of the types of patterns I'm talking about but they add a lot more as well. I always avoided it due to the heavy use of typescript decorators required to get a decent DX, the framework is pretty opinionated on your build system in my experience.

I also didn't often see Lit being used in a way that stuck to the idea that the DOM should be your state. That could very well be because most web devs are coming to it with a background in react or similar, but when I did see Lit used it often involved a heavy use of in-memory state tracked inside of components and never making it into the DOM.

spankaleeOP1mo ago

Lit is not opinionated about your build system You can write Lit components in plain JS, going back to ES2015.

Our decorators aren't required - you can use the static properties block. If you think the DX is better with decorators... that's why we support them!

And we support TypeScript's "experimental" decorators and standard TC39 decorators, which are supported in TypeScript, Babel, esbuild, and recently SWC and probably more.

Regarding state: Lit makes it easier to write web components. How you architect those web components and where they store their state is up to you. You can stick to attributes and DOM if that's what you want. Some component sets out there make heavy use of data-only elements: something of a DSL in the DOM, like XML.

It just turns out that most developer and most apps have an easier time of presenting state in JS, since JS has much richer facilities for that.

pfraze1mo ago

Dont get me wrong, I'm a pretty big believer in interop, but in practice I've rarely run into a situation where I need to mix components from multiple frameworks. Especially because React is so dominant.

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