alt Hacker NewsNever did I ever once think React would one day be compared to PHP.
Reading that post the other day and seeing modern terminology being applied to old backend rendering was quite the experience. "Imagine on initial page load it returns the complete screen UI with all props and components already hydrated".
I remember those days but I remember some of the bad as well. I really started to hate that every UI change in the template/HTML meant changing the page controller to handle the new data. I specifically remember wanting some technology that allowed the UI to dictate what data it needed.
The pendulum swings though and it seems we are reversing course lately. Perhaps we land on a solid middle ground finally.
The point of RSC is that you get the behavior you’re describing without the dev pain points you are describing, and with a high degree of flexibility in customizing what code gets run/sent over the wire where.
HN likes to dunk on React but I think the paradigm is pretty cool and I hope that other meta frameworks beyond NextJS find ways to support it in simpler to follow ways - Tanstack Start has a promising looking philosophy, excited to see where they land on.