And additionally, given that the topic is "building web applications", I can't really understand how you think you can build interactivity without JS. Are you proposing form-based updates or is your understanding of "application" different than GP and mine?
We recently added this "feature" to our react-on-rails codebase, and the only thing I can ask is... why?
Hot reloading on Unreal Engine is a hot mess with all sorts of little caveats to think about. Meanwhile I can hit F5 and as long as my browser is configured right I can guarantee there's no old cruft to deal with. Why in the world would I want to add that kind of uncertainty in my work codebase??
Whenever you’re doing design or interactivity focused tasks, and actually in many cases debugging logic, hot reloading is not only a huge step function improvement, but a categorically different thing.
The analogy I like to make is this: imagine a painter had to wait 3 seconds for every stroke they made to show up. Would they be as good? Would they try out as many variations? Discover new paths they could go because they had the time to “test that weird idea real quick a few times”?
Hot reloading works especially well on React (and not I assume on game engines) because React, with hooks, used algebraic effects, which means all side effects are properly understood by the system and are undoable. So it’s not as hacky at all as you’d imagine.
I never understood the hate for HMR as a concept. Perhaps your implementation wasn’t great, but as a general concept it’s literally a game changer.
The same people who cast shade on it seem to always embrace incremental compilation (like in Rust) for some reason, too.
I guess I can see it in that regard, and knowing the implementation of it is complete and robust helps a lot. And I can see how this is useful for interface design; most of the good IDE gui toolkits of the past preview live as well.
But I also think this lessens the requirement for a solid mind's eye and ability to visualize changes before you make them. Having come from desktop development (with "live" gui development kits like VB) into webdev I guess I got used to code-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-hit-reload pattern.
As long as it doesn't get in my way, I'm cool with it.
The official Rails guides are worth reading and even if you don't want to use Rails are worth checking out as an example if how to do a framework guide well.
As much as your creative sass added to the conversation, I asked a few concrete questions - specifically trying to understand composability, reusability of JS, and what the fellow means by "interactivity" given they claim you can do lots without JS.
They followed it up with a 1-word answer - pretty ridiculous if you ask me - and so I asked an expanding question so I could make my own conclusions of what the other user considers to be acceptable levels of composability and reusability.
While I could undoubtedly find that info myself, I am not the one advocating for Rails here, nor am I the one claiming using Ruby for browser interactivity is a strong idea, so it seems to me like the onus isn't really on me to go search this out
* composable templates
* reusable JS snippets
* hot reloading in your browser
And additionally, given that the topic is "building web applications", I can't really understand how you think you can build interactivity without JS. Are you proposing form-based updates or is your understanding of "application" different than GP and mine?