NuxtLabs is joining Vercel(nuxtlabs.com) |
NuxtLabs is joining Vercel(nuxtlabs.com) |
This could be a great thing as now all of these devs are much better supported in their work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this situation makes me quite nervous.
Props to Vercel, I guess. Enjoy your champagne. Increased the share holder value, job well done! Clap, clap.
Tale as old as… well, the 60’s… but still, it’s an old tale.
there's lots to say here, but from my point of view, Vercel's backing Nuxt largely _because_ of our open vision.
our open approach isn't an optional extra. it's a core value we all share on the team - and indeed, I think, is as close to a core value of the web as I know.
we've pioneered cross-framework adapters and the provider pattern in all we build and there is no way we are changing direction or vision.
nuxt remains an independent framework, like svelte. the fact that a number of us on the team are employed to work full time on OSS is _great_ news for OSS sustainability.
The portability story for Vercel's own Nextjs is a disaster.
Enshittification is inevitable when VC is involved in any way whatsoever, so this doesn't strike me as a good thing. I can already see the future where we're getting convoluted features no one ever asked for for the sole reason of inflating Vercel's hosting costs, as was and is the case with Next and how they completely took over React to the point that even the official React docs mention Next before any alternative like Vite. Hell, knowing the VC playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if in a year's time they decide to shutter Nuxt completely and force everyone to move into the abomination that is Next.
This isn't a swipe against you guys, I'm thrilled to see OS devs like you who truly deserve all the success in the world get that success, I'm just not convinced that a VC-funded company with a dubious history & track record monopolizing the entire frontend framework landscape is a good thing. Thankfully Evan seems to still be independent and as such Vue will continue being independent, but it's a bit worrying that it's basically the only one.
plus, as an open source project, no one _can_ shutter Nuxt. as long as we have a community, we are alive.
from another point of view, any open source project is ultimately accountable to the community, and I think that's especially true for nuxt.
at the end of the day, if sebastien isn't happy with my leadership he can replace me. (and that's _good_ - I wrote about it here: https://roe.dev/blog/governance-and-abuse)
and equally if the community aren't happy with the direction of nuxt, they can always fork it. (and that's _good_)
in fact, I think I'd say that accountability is always good.
I know Nuxt is not Vue itself, and I'm not saying Vue is no longer independent — but I do think it's worth remembering that independence is something highly valued in the Vue community.
They now, to varying degrees, directly employ core maintainers for Svelte, SvelteKit, React, Next, and now Nuxt. This is a very clear systematic overtaking of the web ecosystem. They're a private business, so these moves must be in the interest of increasing profits. It's not just out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's somewhat unfortunate that technical and business-savvy people would both, in my experience, disregard a study saying tobacco is good if it's funded by RJR, and be excited about a giant tech company employing core maintainers for the majority of new web-related software projects. Yes, they're open source projects that you can fork. But if Vercel has influence in the direction of these projects (and of course they do) it should give people much more hesitation to use them than it seems to.
At this point, using any of the technologies that Vercel has its hands in tells me that whatever uses it - a business, project, whatever - doesn't plan to function in five years.
What I mean is that the goal seems likely to be to influence how software development is done in every way possible, from deployment to client code. Vendor locking, with even more control. I'd pitch Vercel as "Heroku's growth plan but more control of everything." Maybe with a bit of EEE thrown in, but who knows.
With Vercel hiring all framework creators, we will never know. Maybe that is what it will take to get hired by tech companies next: create a world-famous open source framework.
As also seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44500544
That said, I can only imagine how incredibly freeing it must be to not have to worry about funding, so I couldn't blame them in the slightest. I really with them the best and hope Nuxt continues to be great. Looking forward to v4 soon!
I choose Nuxt.js and Nuxt UI Pro specifically because they aren't Vercel products. I built two SAAS MVPs over the last year based on this, now I'll have to wait and see what Vercel (their competitor) wants to do with it.
All you have to look at is Svelte, which Vercel hired all the developer of, and that turned out to be a great thing. Svelte and SvelteKit are better than ever and nothing they have done since has shown to be forced by Vercel.
Hard to see the real reason for Vercel to do this. The pessimist in me wonders if perhaps they are hoping to influence how Vue is developed in the same way they now influence how React is developed after hiring several React team members.
But even that doesn’t seem that likely considering the relatively tiny Vue market share and microscopic still Nuxt market share.
I also consider its “community” to be a strange place too. It’s on Discord, and a couple of years ago common internet abbreviations were considered ban worthy rule-breaking offences.
Even the word “lmao” would get you an instant warning from a bot. The framework itself and its oddball community were enough poor experiences for me to stop using it pretty quickly.
I agree.
If you want an SPA just use Vue's official router. It's getting better now thanks to Eduardo working on file-based router, data loaders, Pinia colada, etc.
If you want a static site or MPA, Astro really seems like a better choice than Nuxt.
Nuxt is great, but Chromium is great too. Yet, Google has become the driving force behind changes to the web platform, for better or worse. That’s not a desirable situation, and certainly not the only one: it’s not like there’s only a single company out there able to fund open source software. I desperately hope we, collectively, will figure out a better financing model in the future.
NuxtLabs was doing great work building out support for Cloudflare, making it a viable alternative to Vercel.
Now, I'm sure all that work will get dropped and we'll be stuck with only Vercel being a first-class host for Nuxt-based applications.
So now Nuxt joins Next in the never to use pile.
Next supremacy is very obvious
Kills all those Linkedin threads about moving away from Next. Kills the indecision for what employment-seeking devs need to optimize for. Makes those job descriptions less all over the place and even more Next focused
I also think, even if Nuxt supported React, its overall architecture is just better than Next's.
Everything just seems to plug together better.
Nuxt is the only "out-of-box-everything-works" framework for Vue.
So yes, if you use Vue, you use Nuxt.
Because maintaining three projects is more expensive than maintaining one. It's within their best interests to quietly extinguish any alternatives in favor of the one that most closely matches their vision.
If we want open source to be viable we have to support actually having businesses around it. Vercel making it easy to deploy to their servers seems like a fairly decent business model compared to some of the other options.
I don't claim to know their plans. I've never been in charge of a multibillion dollar company. I just think I have a vague idea of what their general strategy is, and I don't love it.
I'll also say that I definitely want open source projects to succeed. I don't know how they can in a great way in a capitalist system. So maybe this is, from my standpoint, the best of a bad situation. I still think it's worth pointing out and paying attention to from a free software and business position.
Also just want to say thanks for what seems to be a genuine discussion in good faith.
I have also just discovered a dedicated section for the migration from Nuxt to Astro:
>Key Similarities between Nuxt and Astro
Nuxt and Astro share some similarities that will help you migrate your project:
- Astro projects can also be SSG or SSR with page level prerendering.
- Astro uses file-based routing, and allows specially named pages to create dynamic routes.
- Astro is component-based, and your markup structure will be similar before and after your migration.
- Astro has an official integration for using Vue components.
- Astro has support for installing NPM packages, including Vue libraries. You may be able to keep some or all of your existing Vue components and dependencies.
https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/migrate-to-astro/from-nux...
But Astro's model is "generate markup once, serve statically".
Nuxt's model is "Server-Side JavaScript"
So their philosophy is to start with zero client-side javascript, even when one is using components from javascript-heavy frameworks like React or Vue. Interactivity is apparently something one has to explicitly opt-in to by adding a client:* directive, rather than it being the default.
The migration guide states, "Astro projects can also be SSG or SSR with page level prerendering," which puts it on par with Nuxt in that regard.
A difference I've noticed regarding server-side features is that Astro allows one to "define and call backend functions with type-safety."[0] which even Nuxt doesnt offer in such a convenient and type-safe manner. I'm pretty happy with what i'm seeing in Astro's docs so far.
The point is that you’re just seeing business strategy aligned with our interest, but that can, and will, change.
They've been so successful with this in fact, that when you check the actual official React documentation, Next is the offering being advertised prominently [1] (I see they've actually restructured this a bit, a few months ago Next was literally the only thing mentioned here, I assume because of backlash they changed it to what it is now).
I have no doubts they'll do the same with Nuxt, demanding they implement features that solely exist to pad out hosting costs while providing next to no actual benefits to end users and devs, and I have no doubts they'll have the same shenanigans as they do with Next where hosting on anything other than Vercel gives you a broken experience. As an actual Extinguish tactic, I can even see them fully shuttering Nuxt in favor of Next. After all, they now have a monopoly over the most popular frontend meta frameworks (Next, Svelte/Kit, Nuxt, Astro) and paying people to maintain all of that is a lot more expensive than just having the 1 (that already has a huge market share to begin with). Thankfully for now it's MIT and fully OSS, so there's a ray of hope here that even if they pull some shenanigans like that, it'll continue living on independently again, but I don't trust anything that has been touched by VC money as far as I can throw it.
has that happened with Svelte?
> they now have a monopoly over the most popular frontend meta frameworks (Next, Svelte/Kit, Nuxt, Astro)
this would be a surprise to the Astro team!
That's my bad, seems my memory failed me here!
Yes. There are features that have been deliberately kept on the platform level to force you to use the platform instead of implementing it on the framework level or guiding you through it with the docs.
The fact that you prioritize the vercel one and not the node native one proves what OP implies in my opinion.
- Nuxt is a Vue-based SPA (single-page application). Astro sites are multi-page apps built using .astro components, but can also support React, Preact, Vue.js, Svelte, SolidJS, AlpineJS, and raw HTML templating.
- Page Routing: Nuxt uses vue-router for SPA routing, and vue-meta for managing <head>. In Astro, you will create separate HTML page routes and control your page <head> directly, or in a layout component.
- content-driven: Astro was designed to showcase your content and to allow you to opt-in to interactivity only as needed. An existing Nuxt app may be built for high client-side interactivity. Astro has built-in capabilities for working with your content, such as page generation, but may require advanced Astro techniques to include items that are more challenging to replicate using .astro components, such as dashboards.
[0] https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/migrate-to-astro/from-nux...
Nuxt is a server-side JavaScript framework with a complete HTTP application stack, built on top of Nitro (which includes an even larger suite of capabilities) and H3.
https://nitro.build https://v1.h3.dev
Astro is markup generation.
They are only comparable in that "both can print markup".
If that's the case, you're completely missing the point.
I am pointing out that CWV scores are irrelevant to the discussion.
You are arguing that a Miata is valid competitor to an F150, while I'm repeatably trying to explain I need to tow a horse trailer.
[0] https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/#server-islands