New trends in Javascript ecosystem

One of the benefits of being many years in the same field is to see things evolve. You get to know how things started, the reason that required them to change, and you see the process repeating over and over. You understand why things are the way they are right now. You get able to spot trends and patterns.

I remember the Javascript fatigue. I remember being a freelance and struggling to learn a ton of new tools, just to see them deprecated in a few months. I remember an ecosystem where no clear winner was able to agglomerate efforts from the community, while a lot of contenders continuously fought each other. Who paid the expenses for such troubled days was the common developer, who just needed trusted tools to build good software without learning to use new tools.

I also remember when React won. It became the “hot thing” exactly as all other tools before it, but then something happened: the next contender, vue, was not able to overthrow it. The cycle stopped, React was able to be the dominant long enough to collect “social” power: community posts, questions, libraries. Svelte, Preact, Solid, all were technically superior to React - and still are, but they’ve never been able to obtain the same support from the ecosystem: jobs, design systems, form libraries… and so on.

The wheel was finally stopped, and I rejoed that moment. I could finally settle on one tool, become proficient with it, and focus on what I really enjoyed: creating value for my users.

Now I see the wind is changing, and I am both excited and frightened. React grip over the community has weakened over time, also thanks to questionable decisions from the core team about how to communicate their long-term goals. Node itself seems to have contenders now that both Deno and Bun have found their own share of the community. React Server Components comes as the unintuitively and unnecessarily complex answer to Astro’s and Fresh islands. There’s new activity, new contenders arise, and the current dominant tools are being unable to fight back appropriately.

Don’t get me wrong, often within such times of turmoil comes benefits - for the ones able to leverage them. Bun honestly excites me by trying to push the ecosystem away from the slow and user-hostile environment Javascript developers find themselves, with different ways to import files, different transformers needed to use JSX and TS, and different test runners. Also, the race to become the main full-stack Javascript-based framework looks very interesting, and brings the hope of having an easier way to develop whole applications in the future.

But I have concerns too. In the past having no lasting leader made our life much harder and the collective experience and efforts of many developers were fragmented and wasted, for the drawback of everyone.

I don’t know if I’d prefer to maintain the status quo or to start a new age of change, but I also don’t know if it makes any sense at all to have preferences on how history goes on. I just hope that, if we ever find ourselves in a new Javascript civil war, we’ll remember the pain we felt, and why we moved away from that.