🗑️ Roast of solidjs/solid
The Framework That Says "I Can Fix Her" to React Developers
Congratulations on finding SolidJS, the framework for developers who love React’s syntax but hate React’s philosophy, popularity, and job market.
You are looking at a repository that is essentially React’s rebellious younger brother. It wears the same clothes (JSX), hangs out in the same neighborhoods, but screams at the top of its lungs, "I'M NOT USING A VIRTUAL DOM, DAD! IT'S JUST DOM NODES! GOSH!"
🎣 The "Uncanny Valley" of Web Development
Browsing solidjs/solid feels like walking into a parallel universe. Everything looks familiar, but if you touch it, it bites you.
You see a component. You see props. You think, "Ah, I know this! I'll just destructure these props..."
BOOM. đź’Ą You just killed the reactivity.
That is the SolidJS experience: Gaslighting. It lures you in with divs and spans, only to slap your hand with a ruler because you dared to treat a JavaScript object like a JavaScript object. Welcome to a world where accessors are functions and if you forget the () at the end of a signal, your UI stays as static as a PDF.
🚦 Signals: We Get It, You Were Right
We have to give credit where it’s due: Ryan Carniato (the creator) spent years yelling about Fine-Grained Reactivity while the rest of us were drowning in useEffect dependency arrays.
Now that Angular, Preact, Qwik, and Svelte have all adopted Signals, Solid sits in the corner like a hipster at a coffee shop saying, "I was into Signals before they sold out."
But let’s be real: Reading Solid code is just an endless sea of createSignal, createMemo, and createEffect. It looks less like a UI library and more like you're manually wiring a bomb.
🕵️‍♂️ The "Control Flow" Components
React developers use JavaScript array.map() to render lists. Solid developers use... <For>.
React developers use ternary operators. Solid developers use... <Show>.
Why use the programming language you already know when you can revive XML tags from the early 2000s? Solid claims it's for performance, but it feels like we’re one version away from reinventing XSLT.
📉 The Ecosystem: "There Are Dozens of Us!"
The solidjs/solid repository is incredibly impressive, high-performance, and lightweight. You know what else is lightweight? The ecosystem.
Building a Solid app is a fun game of "Will this library work?"
* "Does this UI kit support Solid?" No.
* "Is there a wrapper for this animation library?" Maybe, but it hasn't been updated in 8 months.
* "Can I copy-paste this StackOverflow answer?" Absolutely not, see the 'destructuring props' section above.
🔥 Final Verdict
SolidJS is the CrossFit of JavaScript frameworks. It is undeniably efficient, technically superior, and the people who use it will never stop talking about how much faster it is than what you use.
It is a Ferrari engine inside a chassis that looks suspiciously like a Honda Civic. It’s brilliant, fast, and technically correct—the best kind of correct—but you’ll spend half your development time explaining to your team why they can't just use useState.