Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button

Regarding Rust, are we talking about a Rust backend with RPC/REST or is it simply WebAssembly compiled from Rust? If the latter, how is the data synced for CRUD?

Congrats, Nue seems to be an impressive and well-thought-out design system & framework. It feels like a strong candidate to become the "Web Standards Stack" —finally freeing developers from the complexity and bloat of modern frontend tooling.

I've been following Nue for a while now, and I'm eager to use it for real world apps. Any updates on when the design system will be released? I know you're ambitious, but I'd suggest launching a single design system first to test the waters, gather feedback, and gain traction — rather than waiting to release everything at once (but losing out to the ecosystem).

Replace N in Nue with V for Vue, and it will be perfection.

this is why inertia.js is a positive path forward.

it relegates React, Vue etc to be view layers - purely view layers. all models / state etc handled by your monolith Rails, Laravel server. this simplifies a lot of things.

frameworks like Vue & Svelte have scoped styles which preserve knowledge of CSS. While Tailwind is convenient - a lot of people won't know the capability of CSS

and why it was named cascading & the customability of CSS for the user.

But what if it is not the frameworks that are bloated but the application developers that make bloated applications? Then how would this fix anything ...

Would you be able to hook this up to https://www.convex.dev/?

Couldn't switch to docs from the page linked here, Chrome on macOS. Refresh and it works. Big hopes killed in an instant.

Just do VanillaJS...the W3C is your framework.

Is it trying to sell Backbone.js-style MVC as a replacement for React?

Absolutely brilliant I've been following Nue for a while and every release gets more and more impressive.

Thank you so much for putting in the hard work by making it and I hope others can understand why this is important and use it instead of cargo culting React and making the web worse every single year.

No thanks, JSX is fine.

If React is good enough to power Facebook, it's good enough for your <1k users app.

I like this. Cant wait to see it being released.

How does it involve Rust? Server side or wasm?

Nah this is crazy

love the demo and overall reason for this, hope it gets the following and support it deserves!

That post didn’t explain what it actually is. Is it a JavaScript framework? A WASM library? Something else?

Comparing a JavaScript app to anything wasm is false equivalence because wasm can’t do the DOM.

imo the primary benefit of react is the nice component library.

The main benefit React is giving my app is just the ability to update the DOM automatically and efficiently, without me worrying about doing anything but updating the state variables. I have a feeling some very well crafted prompt to the best AI in the world could just about generate something that can also do this in like 500 lines of JS, in a single file. Once we have that, we can get rid of React maybe?

I also hate JSX, and have my app setup so I create GUI elements programatically like "button = new Button("Save", db.save)". Templating has so many friction points I find it to not even be worth the complexity, expecially once you have templates containing other templates with looping and conditionals, etc, and you end up with just an extra layer of cognitive load. No thanks. We can do better. With the capabilities of modern JS (classes, imports, etc) we can phase out React and Vue.

> What's next We're improving the developer experience in three distinct phases: Framework -> Design -> Cloud

So the "cloud" part is where the enshittification will begin. Been there, done that, switched away from next.js :|

1. It's an SSG and competes with projects like Astro or Solid or Next. Comparing to React is apples to oranges.

2. Benchmarks are just numbers without details. React+ReacDOM gzipped/minified is 40 kb in 2025. I doubt a button adds 30 kb. But if you really want to make small SPAs, Preact is just 4 kb and it doesn't require to learn a new bespoke templating DHTML-style thing.

3. From FAQ

> The WebAssembly example in our demo isn't about raw performance — it demonstrates something far more important: what becomes possible when your business logic is properly separated from presentation.

> But when your business logic lives in its own pure layer, entirely new possibilities emerge. Rust is just one example — you could model complex financial calculations, build sophisticated data visualization engines, or create real-time collaboration systems. Your logic can evolve independently of the interface, enabling the kind of architectural advances that the React monolith prevents.

The writer was high or delusional or bad at explaining the point. Nothing prevents you from putting logic into "its own pure layer" in any language. You can make it messy and impure with Rust/WASM/... just as you can keep it pure with pure JS. And it's not "entirely new" because people separated business logic for literally decades (and believe it or not many of them even did it while using React at the same time)

And meanwhile the Rust version is slower and bigger. "What becomes possible" is a mystery.

"React monolith" just takes the cake. React literally doesn't care how you separate your business logic, it's just a rendering layer. This ironically is a monolith SSG that does routing, YAML frontmatter, Markdown extensions, syntax highlighting and what not. Again, you are thinking about something like MarkoJS or QwikJS. Before you are trying to take something down you should probably understand the basics.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cool project. But it could be more humble because authors don't seem to fully understand themselves what exactly they are proposing.

This is cool. Though I think what could be improved is using folder routing, it works surprisingly well.

I really like the use of markdown and extending it. I think this is the way to go.

Also how you are thinking about app theme and design is really good.

This button demo... really ambivalent about it.

Do the AI's generate slow and bloated React, or lean React that works well with the new compiler?

why would 150,000 records break React and throw overflow exception ?

A React comparison is a straw man when there are already popular alternatives that are considerably smaller than React.

> 150,000 records — far past where JavaScript (and React) would crash with a stack overflow error

I think react-virtualized and stack tables can easily handle 1 million rows client-side without a problem (I saw the demo somewhere).

Web development is about convenience, and the speed of development is far more important than ultra optimizations. People simply don't care about super optimizations because servers are so fast these days, and bandwidth is cheap, almost free.

But it's an interesting project. Good luck.

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