Well I was comparing client-side apps like Android/Java VS React/JS.
PHP vs React/JS is not really an apple to apple comparison because you still need client code to achieve high interactivity like Gmail did first.
Few questions on how to improve your webpack build/hot-reloading time:
Are you on webpack5?
Are you using Yarn 2 PnP?
Did you break the app in multiple import() modules?
we have a very large mono-repo all with like 30 services 10 webapps and 4 native app wrappers.
The main B2B app is the biggest with like 50 separate pages and 100 modals/dialogs.
The build time is around 40 seconds to produce the production bundles. More impotantly than that though is the weback serve/dev-server/hot-reload update time and that takes 1-3 seconds.
Essentially if I can a letter in the UI and I save it take 1-3 seconds to see in the browser.
This is with the largest webapp we have. All other webapps refresh in less than a second and essentially time you switch from the editor to the browser the page has already been refreshed.
Webpack 5 for example is significantly slower than Webpack4.
There are hacks to speed it up but you need to make workarounds or turn off features to get acceptable speeds.
This makes it needlessly complicated to configure and manage project just to compile JS...
Even faster than webpack? This thing is dog slow to me. Sit here compiling for 40 seconds every time I restart my app.
That may be nice if you previously had minutes of compile time, but I came from PHP where everything was instant.
> Typing is overrated in my opinion.
For very small projects, maybe. For large 100k+ LOC projects, most definitely not.