This new JS framework wants you to quit React…

Key Takeaways

Remember back in the good old days of 2019, when life was so good we could do things like raid Area 51 for fun and cosplay as soldiers when choosing a JavaScript framework? When you could go to a sketchy coding boot camp, learn a few days worth of Backbone.js, and immediately land a six-figure job? Back before murder hornets, NFTs, Morbius, and before AI killed the junior developer, the work-life balance, ping pong tables, and paychecks bigger than other real licensed engineers weren't enough. We also needed to act like we were so overwhelmed that if we had to learn one more thing, we would quit and take on a much more rewarding job like being a literal farmer. We even invented a new medical condition for the psychosis called a JavaScript fatigue. The idea was that there were so many free, open source, volunteer-led libraries and frameworks to choose from that it was too overwhelming to both learn them while also trying to unlock Fortnite's battle pass each season. Although things are a bit different today, there's one man crazy enough to think he can bring back the JavaScript fatigue. In today's video, we'll take a look at this new UI framework and decide whether it would be easier to learn it or just become a coal miner instead. It is November 6, 2025 and you're watching The Code Report. And nowadays, if someone tells you they made a new UI framework, you should ignore them and call McGruff the Crime Dog because they're probably on DMT conversing telepathically with machine elves about button hover states in the seventh dimension. The one exception though is if that person is Dominic Galloway. Dominic first became popular about a decade ago when he released Inferno, which you can think of like React if React were actually fast. No one really used it, but it was impressive enough to get him an offer at Facebook where he joined to work on the React core team in 2016. A few years later, he realized working on React kind of sucks, which led him to join Vercel to work on the Svelte core team in 2023. A few years after that, he realized he's actually a peacock who needed to fly. And his time on the React and Svelte core teams made him uniquely qualified to do it again. And that brings us to a new TypeScript framework called Ripple, a compiler-driven view library for the web based on a superset of JSX. As you can probably guess, it looks like the love child of Svelte and React with a hint of infidelity with Solid.js. You define a component with the component keyword, and you can use this JSX-like syntax to describe your UI. But unlike JSX, instead of writing expressions, you write statements, which means you can do some cool things like write an if statement or for loop directly within your template. And you can use the style element to get native CSS styling that's scoped and localized to the component where it's defined. But its best feature may be how it handles reactivity. You use the track function to create a value that can change over time and prepend it with the at sign whenever you need to read or write it. From there, with fine-grained rendering, Ripple will surgically apply any mutations it needs to the DOM. Although it's brand new, it already comes with prettier and ESLint support, a VS Code extension for syntax highlighting and IntelliSense, and of course, full TypeScript integration and type checking. Who knows if it'll catch on or not, but if it doesn't, you can at least keep having your AI write your React code with Kiro, the sponsor of today's video. It's a new AI IDE created by AWS that's built for larger, more complex projects using an approach called spec-driven development. Instead of diving straight into code, Kiro starts with a requirements.md file to define your user story and acceptance criteria. It then it creates a design doc to outline things like your architecture plan and testing strategy. Those specs then get merged into an implementation file where each task outlines what code the AI should write and lets you track progress along the way. It even lets you automate repetitive jobs by setting up agent hooks that trigger on specific events like updating your documentation whenever you save a file. But Kiro is especially useful when working on teams where design docs and consistent code quality matter. And you can try it out for free using the link below. Or join the Kiroweens hackathon to access all their pro tier features and see if it actually lives up to the hype. This has been The Code Report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.