
GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away - kbal11
https://zendev.com/2018/06/19/react-usage-beating-vue-angular.html
======
lsalvatore
No one I work with has ever even brought up the possibility of switching from
React to Vue, let alone counting Github stars.

Compare to when React came out, it was immediate consensus that we need to
switch from Backbone to React. When Angular gained popularity, we did not have
an urge to switch because it felt unclear what the scope and direction of
Angular actually was.

React (really JSX) solves the single problem of making HTML a part of
JavaScript. For me, it's game over, they have solved the problem or came close
enough to where I'm comfortable staying in the React ecosystem for the rest of
my career.

With React there's no weird "v-if ng-if" template logic that you have to
grapple with. To me, Handlebars already gave me enough taste of how horrible
and limiting maintaining template logic outside of components is.

Just my take. No desire to even download Vue and try it out, I don't foresee
any productivity gains from it.

~~~
lsalvatore
I also wanted to make an additional comment expressing my frustration with the
consistently negative comments on posts like this about JS Frameworks.

These commenters, those who see React as "just another JS Framework" and whom
see JavaScript developers as people who would change JS Frameworks as if they
were ordering a new drink at Starbucks: These people are the epitome of
amateur.

Building web apps has been my career for nearly a decade. If you think entire
teams would just up and switch to a new JS framework tomorrow because of a
Medium article, or because of Github stars, you don't understand how the
industry works at all.

React is not a fashion statement, it's an evolved paradigm shift in the web.
Vue is not, it looks like Angular and Handlebars, the way apps were built 5
years ago, it adds nothing to the industry but more bloat and distracting
people from using React.

~~~
mythrwy
Thus spoke the priest of the inquisition confronting heretics distracting from
the one true way:)

I personally had a lot of trouble with React, I didn't care for it, it was too
foreign, too invasive.

Vue on the other hand just clicked nicely and appeared a thing of simplicity
and beauty.

But admittedly I'm a wanton sinner. Who also don't care for Facebook products
no matter how great and open and popular they are.

~~~
lsalvatore
React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook. Facebook
had a good reputation at the time, and so we forgive Jordan's divine genius
for that slight error in career choice.

------
AngeloAnolin
Not really big fan of articles like this. Why the need to compare and say this
one has more stars, or is more used, etc.

I am thankful that we have these frameworks / libraries / modules that have
greatly helped in our software development process.

At the end of the day, what matters is developer productivity, their happiness
and satisfaction (regardless of the toolkit they use), and the overall value
that their product brings to their intended target (outcomes).

P.S. I use Vue, React, Angular, whichever suits the need of the client the
most.

~~~
pgm8705
It's a reasonable expectation that a framework with more users will have more
documentation, more examples, more contributions from the community, etc.
While I agree that a developer should choose based on what will make them most
productive and happy, popularity is still an important factor.

When comparing 2 or more frameworks or libraries to use, I always check out
the github repo and look at the number of stars. I don't see a problem with
this article pointing out that this metric may not be the best indicator of
usage.

~~~
bonestamp2
Also, in enterprise consultant built apps we often have to consider what kind
of talent we're going to be able to get for that project. It's much easier to
get Angular and React developers than Vue developers at the moment. That could
certainly change in a year of course.

~~~
nomocrypto
It boggles my mind that companies don’t expect frontend devs to be able to
transfer knowledge between frameworks. Do they just not have that skill or do
companies really not believe those devs are capable of that? Or both?

~~~
bonestamp2
We know that good devs can pickup new frameworks quickly and easily. But, when
we're charging our customers top dollar they want devs who are experts day 1,
and (unfortunately) we can only charge top dollar if we bring those people.
But, that's just our business model... I know some other consulting companies
that charge lower rates and hire people with less experience.

------
nostalgeek
A lot of people using Vue just link Vue from a CDN and drop it in a webpage as
a script, without using NPM. Does the stats account that fact? Sure you can do
that with React as well, but you wont in production with JSX as one needs to
compile it with node.js toolchain. Same for Angular. Vue usage is more like
jQuery usage than React in practice.

~~~
lhorie
You can also look at job postings as another metric of popularity. Last I
checked, Vue wasn't sought nearly as much as React.

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kankroc
People have wildly different views on what Github stars are. Some see it as a
way to bookmark project you find interesting while other simply stars whenever
they feel like the project is impressive.

Bottomline is: it's not a good metric, it's simply a way to see how "popular"
something is and how likely it is that some random developer saw your project.

While anecdotal, I've starred Vue because I see it as a cool project and I've
starred React as another cool project. In both case, I did toy projects with
the frameworks and never used it in production. On the other hand,
apache/httpd I did a lot of projects with and I did not give it a star yet.

In my opinion stars are not endorsement, they're a questionable way to measure
how likely it is that your coworker have heard of a given project.

~~~
49531
Also having created, promoted, and contributed to repositories with >100 stars
it seems that ~10% of people who view the repository will star it. Not sure
how reliable it is but I've always taken stars to indicate how many people
have seen the project.

~~~
styfle
I have a couple projects that are getting a decent amount of stars recently
and I'm looking at the stats for the last two weeks:

\- One has 3750 unique visitors, and 680 stars in 2 weeks

\- Another has 80 unique visitors, 20 stars in 2 weeks

------
tropshop
React ecosystem heavily encourages the use of build tools dependent on NPM
package management.

Vue users are more likely to bypass NPM. They are often on-boarded with the
gentler approach most familiar to those who "sprinkle in some jQuery" \- Drop
in a <script> tag and you are ready to rock. This approach is more likely to
use a local file or from CDN.

~~~
chrisco255
Curious how Vue users are getting by without Webpack / Parcel for Babel and
maintaining 3rd party dependencies via NPM? Copying and pasting Vue components
from Stack Overflow? That approach may be fine for small web pages, but for
commercial applications, it's not a viable approach.

~~~
tropshop
We avoid Webpack/Parcel and NPM dependencies entirely. I understand that
convenience wins for most people, but it comes with a cost. Dependencies are
magically stitched together with limited developer insight, arbitrary 3rd
party code can make it into your production bundle on a whim, and it is far
from "optimized" output.

We use rollup[1] for our production bundle. We manage all 3rd party
dependencies by source control. We don't need to rely on NPM for
ES5/ES6/CommonJS/AMD/Modules - We have full control of each dependency to use
the code that is most fit. Sometimes that is already checked-in by the author,
sometimes we need to build it, sometimes we can use the modern ES6 code
directly, sometimes we can remove duplicate polyfills already in our bundle.

It takes bit more discipline, but the extra security, optimal build, and peace
of mind knowing how things work, are well worth the effort to us.

[1] [https://rollupjs.org](https://rollupjs.org)

~~~
eppsilon
How do you update the dependencies when the author releases a new version?
Sounds like it would be a lot of work....

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taylorswift_
Why do people care which framework "blows" the other one away? In my opinion,
it literally doesn't matter at all and arguing over such things seems amateur.

Use whatever tool gets the job done.

~~~
chrisco255
I mean, I could technically dig a hole in the ground with a spoon...it would
get the job done, after all...or I could use a shovel or a back hoe. All three
are capable of digging holes. Discussing which tools work best is an important
question in software development. After all, the tools you choose can be force
multipliers in your overall productivity as a team or organization.

~~~
taylorswift_
> Discussing which tools work best is an important question in software
> development.

I completely agree, but would you write an article titled "Spoons still
blowing away Forks in digging holes"?

~~~
chrisco255
Maybe...if Forks were more popular on Github?

~~~
bausshf
Is this a crossover episode?

------
baby
I agree that number of use is a good factor when choosing a framework. But Vue
has incredible tools, resources and community so don't let that get in your
way. I've tried all three and Vue is just such a pleasure to use.

------
bhouston
I think that Vue.js is on the ascendance. I mentioned this earlier. It is on
track to exceed React.js if things continue in this fashion. Github stars are
a reflection of interest.

I do worry that Vue.js is mostly one guy, you like to at least have a higher
bus factor than one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor)

~~~
rmason
Vue was started by one guy. Vue is lead by one guy. But there's a core team
behind Vue and it's growing ;<).

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gakos
Appreciate !== vs !=, no type conversion on Stars and Usage in comparison.
Also, agreed. Would be more interesting to crawl all repos to see which have
React vs Vue vs Angular for a more detailed understanding of usage.

~~~
briandear
Except most professional projects would be private or on GitHub Enterprise so
even that metric would have some severe selection bias.

~~~
gakos
Good point. I guess we'd have to rely on Github publishing this data to get
the full picture.

------
KeitIG
Of course GitHub stars do not show usage, it shows interest. Considering Vue
came later, we can also say its interest grew much faster.

There is no winner anyway, both React and Vue are amazing tools giving you the
power to solve the same problem in different ways: building UIs.

------
mfer
MooTools is in wider use on the web than Angular, React, and Vue.js combined.
[https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library...](https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library/all)

It's funny, to me anyway, that this post look at the developer/development
side of things rather than the end consumers of apps/sites side of things.

~~~
yzmtf2008
Isn't the survey you posted, counting the "number of pages" (which isn't
exactly a good metric in the world of SPAs), even funnier by entirely looking
at the development side of things?

------
cokelee
One observation worth remembering: Enterprise usage would most likely be
hosted locally / downloaded once per version and used by N internal projects.

~~~
hinkley
Artifactory is a pain in the butt, but it’s atill a lot better than sharing a
gigabit line with twenty other developers, the IT dept and those assholes in
management who watch the ball gane on their work computer.

------
iammiles
After building two large applications using React, Redux, Redux Sagas, and
Typescript, I feel burnt out. I'm honestly surprised Elm or ReasonML aren't
more popular as they seem to provide all those aforementioned libraries in one
go.

~~~
duderific
Vue is ascending precisely because it combines some of the better features of
those libraries - most notably, the centralized data store concept, which was
the driving force behind developing Redux (having your state in one place
instead of spread out across many components.)

------
jmvoodoo
Vue, React and Angular (and many other frameworks) have enough critical mass
that they aren't going away, and will continue to get regular updates. This,
combined with how well the framework fits your particular use case and team,
is all that matters. Why we focus on which one is "biggest" is beyond me.
Biggest doesn't matter. Big enough does. Once a framework achieves that size,
it can be considered for things other than personal toy projects, and all the
other factors are what should guide your final decision.

------
mike-cardwell
I've never heard anyone say that you can do X in Vue much easier than in
React. I've heard a bunch of people say that it's easier to learn than React,
but I found React very very easy to learn anyway. Basically, I've not heard a
convincing reason to look into Vue yet, so I haven't.

Also, people contact me about jobs involving React several times a week. I've
never been contacted about a job involving Vue. Not once.

I'm sure Vue is good, but _shrug_ , so is React.

~~~
abritinthebay
I don't think it should be framed as Vue vs React in the first place.

They approach similar (but not quite the same) problems in different ways.
They are both really great! It doesn't have to be zero sum.

------
md224
Considering FuckItJS has 2.9k stars, I would hope that stars !== usage. :)

------
hinkley
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we all walked to school uphill,
everybody used Struts for server side page rendering.

And at least a half of them hated it. When something better came along they
dropped it like a rock.

Usage is a poor predictor of future sucesses. If people ar rooting for someone
else, people have already started turning on you.

------
tomhallett
One thing to think about is what is the motivation/incentive for someone to
take a specific action. For me personally, I will "star" something that I find
interesting AND I think I might forget how to find it again. Example: people
might forget the exact name/repo for colors.js so they will be incentivized to
star it, but no one will forget "apache".

That's why vue might gain more stars than the current dominant players (react
and/or angular)

------
pull_my_finger
I had a friend say something that I think is a pretty good way to look at it.
He said: "React is the blockbuster hit at the box office, while Vue is the
critics' darling"

The big question is if it's good enough to replace what's already established.
Things will probably equalize eventually, but by the time Vue overtakes, if it
does, there will probably be some kind of new and shinier thing that intends
to replace both of them.

------
rv77ax
I think using number of downloaded will also count number of build on each
commit. Imagine if you have three branch in your repository, each push will
rebuild the project (redownload dependencies). If you push three times a day
it will download three dependencies three times.

Also, some project include their dependencies to VCS which only count once per
build.

------
bartaxyz
I was thinking what is the reason that Vue have more stars than React given it
is not used more (perhaps in China it is). My guess would be that it's because
Vue is more community driven than React. Vue is dependent only on community
while React is dependent on Facebook & community. Therefore I believe Vue
community share more excitement for the project.

------
nashashmi
Maybe star power is more of a sign of acceleration than usage. For example, if
I have several projects in react, and then I start to move into Vue, it is not
like I am going to convert my past projects over to Vue as well. I'll only be
starting my future projects in Vue.

So that means more and more developers are beginning to get interested into
Vue.

------
luord
That's alright to me, I use vue in my own projects and react at work and while
I greatly prefer one, I don't hate the other (anymore).

An aside note is that I wish there were fewer developers in this type of
threads pretending that the abomination that is JSX makes react better than
vue... which can use JSX just fine.

------
frou_dh
While we're talking about starring, here's a great webapp that lets you tag
and organise your existing GitHub stars beyond the anemic official capability
(filter by language)

[https://astralapp.com/](https://astralapp.com/)

(I'm unaffiliated)

------
bovermyer
OK. I will still continue to eschew Angular and React in favor of Vue. It
works with my brain best.

------
bobinux
My Pentium 4 CPU fan is still blowing better than any of these JS frameworks
will ever will.

------
ct520
I for one measure my developer e-peen (used to get me real women interwebz
dates) by how many stars my framework of choices uses. I am shocked and
appalled by these findings.

------
galfarragem
While Vue fits my brain _way_ better, most companies use React. Why? Their
decision makers feel safer. (FB backing)

This makes me reluctant to jump in and burn bridges.

------
briandear
I star plenty of things that might be crap, but have something interesting
about them. Not saying that applies here, but some of my favorite libraries
aren’t starred because I use them so much and have the page memorized. Stars
are a terrible metric. For example, I don’t have Rails starred.

------
toufique
GitHub Stars !== Usage. GitHub Stars ~ Interestingness.

------
fiatjaf
The Vue community is not friendly.

------
sidcool
React is indeed the new jQuery.

~~~
aldoushuxley001
Isn't Vue the new jQuery? Because you can drop it in so much easier

~~~
DanHulton
In usage, maybe. React is the "people are learning this instead of raw
javascript" kind of default that jQuery became.

I hope it does the same thing that jQuery did, and that is essentially make
itself unnecessary in a lot of ways. Take all the really good features of
React and make them browser-native.

To a certain degree, this is already happening. Web components are inching
closer every day.

~~~
hesarenu
React apps would require more raw JavaScript then say Vue/angular with their
own template logic stuff.

------
acupofnope
why does this matter? (not trying to be argumentative. genuinely curious)

------
IanDrake
I wonder to what extent npm downloads can be attributed to version changes.

