Couldn't agree more. We've been having good luck working with TSX-templated Vue components (using "render functions"[1]) after getting fed up with gaps in VTI back in the day – most of https://radiopaper.com is built in this way and we're closing in on it all being so. We haven't run into any issues with Vue's (alleged) lack of ability to optimize TSX templates in certain ways as opposed to traditional Vue templates – maybe comes down to the nature of our use cases – but our view is that this trades off against many other benefits:
- File extensions are all .tsx, and thus work with bog-standard editor tooling and syntax highlighting
- We're more confident about typechecking in templates, because template code is 1 minor transformation away from raw typescript, and basic `tsc` has understood TSX well for years now. Up and down the component stack, it feels like we understand typings better without "gaps" at each template layer.
- Scoping of values in templates is easier to understand. Everything you write is what it says it is, it's just whatever's in the same scope as the template. There are no transformations, no omissions of various words, no magic.
- It's easier to compose templates from small easy-to-understand parts in the same file, without fragmenting code across many small components. Not everything needs to live in a `<template>` tag separate from your `<script>` tag.
- When React folks have joined the team they've had no problem ramping up.
- By the way, in Vue TSX you just say "class" not "className" which is refreshing.
Feel free to email me at evan at radiopaper dot com if any of this interests you – we're currently working on expanding the team and looking for like-minded people interested in contributing.
Hi Evan! That sounds really interesting! Would you have a short code example for me, demonstrating what your typical Vue component looks like? Is it similar to the examples at the end of https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/render-function.html ?
I'd also be interested in how you write (S)CSS for your components – do you use some form of CSS-in-JS?
CSS-in-JS has been a challenge – we're currently using https://github.com/astroturfcss/astroturf which seemed the simplest zero-runtime-cost option back when we were looking, but the library is starting to feel a bit under-maintained (if the author of Astroturf reads this, we love your work and will do whatever we can to support you in it!). But it's worked well for us over the last 2 years.
Happy to share a component example. We also use a small library for managing CSS classes in a typed fashion, which can also be used by our UI test code to target various elements. So that does add a bit of cryptic boilerplate, but the repo README has an example component with syntax highlighting:
https://github.com/evnp/namespace.style#usage
- File extensions are all .tsx, and thus work with bog-standard editor tooling and syntax highlighting
- We're more confident about typechecking in templates, because template code is 1 minor transformation away from raw typescript, and basic `tsc` has understood TSX well for years now. Up and down the component stack, it feels like we understand typings better without "gaps" at each template layer.
- Scoping of values in templates is easier to understand. Everything you write is what it says it is, it's just whatever's in the same scope as the template. There are no transformations, no omissions of various words, no magic.
- It's easier to compose templates from small easy-to-understand parts in the same file, without fragmenting code across many small components. Not everything needs to live in a `<template>` tag separate from your `<script>` tag.
- When React folks have joined the team they've had no problem ramping up.
- By the way, in Vue TSX you just say "class" not "className" which is refreshing.
Feel free to email me at evan at radiopaper dot com if any of this interests you – we're currently working on expanding the team and looking for like-minded people interested in contributing.
[1] https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/render-function.html