I really enjoyed Justin Schroeder (ArrowJS author)'s recent " Design Patterns for Modern JavaScript talk, which to me spoke quite plainly but elegantly about where we are & what's happened in JS. Good touchstone talk on what life is like in 2023.

The culmination of the talk was pulling all the other pieces together with ArrowJs, and showing crazy blitz fast data-reactivity. It definitely peaked my interest a lot. Ultra-small but good ideas, well built.

https://youtu.be/a0Z-1P73EDk

https://vanjs.org is another attempt for the goal

I actually really like that. It's playing some devious games behind the scenes with getters and setters that React makes clearer with useState hook, but I think I could get used to it.

I do like JSX, but also the idea of skipping the extra compilation layer. I wrote a similar Java HTML library, a while ago, but such things never caught on. It still seems better to me than templates. If you're not gonna use JSX, let your type checker do the work.

I don't see an equivalent of useEffect, so I'd have to see how well it works with side-effect type things. There's something coming in version 1.0, and that could really make this work.

I'll have to give it a try the next time I've got a pet project. Thanks.