I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.
I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant.<p>However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that.<p>In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday.<p>I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
In the event that Meta were to dissolve, liquidate their assets, and return the money to the shareholders, I suspect we would quickly see the establishment of the React Foundation or something akin to that under the mantle of some other open source software foundation.<p>Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).
React is the jQuery of the modern web. It's open-source; it's very popular; it won't die immediately if Meta were to fall; but maybe we will one day grow out of it.
If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.
I don't think "Meta" will die, but "Facebook" might... Meta being the parent company, Facebook being a sub company... As long as Meta keeps something running (I am going to guess that Facebook Infrastructure might be spun out and used as a separate entity) they may have other stuff as a post Facebook project... This whole "Metaverse" thing is one of those that might end up replacing Facebook... then again, both could die and something else takes over... [Edit] Doesn't directly answer your question... but if internal dev still need React, they will keep it around...
What does a JavaScript library have to do with a second life clone effort by Facebook?<p>The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit.<p>React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.
Think of all the technologies that we use today that were invented at companies that no longer exist, or are no longer relevant. E.g. Java was invented at Sun, C at Bell Labs. Why would it be different?
You can already (and perhaps should) use <i>preact</i> today, a much better React clone. With 2 lines of webpack config, it can even be a complete drop-in replacement with no code changes.
Ideally a foundation of sorts would spin up to take over managing the project. There's more than enough companies with big pockets deeply invested in the React ecosystem.
Interestingly we’re at the peak it seems. However none have shown any crazy adoption yet. Svelte seemed like it would be really popular but when pandemic hit I stopped hearing about it as much. Hopefully WASM will take over.<p>Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
React has far too much investment from major companies to die. If something happened to Meta (metaverse doesn't work out and they are chopped up and sold off for parts), React would most likely be spun off into a Apache style foundation (ie. "The React Foundation")
React is a core part of WordPress, which runs >40% of all sites on the internet, so that alone should be enough to keep it supported for the foreseeable future with or without Meta's engineers.
don't take the adjustment in share price lead you to believe that something is fundamentally out of order with fb's businesses. they're still well positioned and are an essential service for many people worldwide. they seem to have been able to monetize fairly well, too. where do you get the idea that they are going to 'die?'