Kudzu Framework Aims to Scale Beyond Static Sites Without Rebuilding React's Runtime

Kudzu is an open-source, compiler-first web framework that allows developers to write React-style TypeScript/TSX while eliminating React, a virtual DOM, and hydration by default. The framework analyzes components, state, and dependencies at build time, shipping only the JavaScript a page actually requires. Its developer argues that while the compiler excels at producing lean static pages, the harder challenge is supporting real-world application needs such as shared state, async data loading, routing, and realtime updates. Two risky shortcuts — adding a generic React-compatible runtime or hard-coding support for popular libraries one by one — are both seen as undermining the framework's core purpose. Instead, the proposed path forward is a three-layer architecture with a normalization layer sitting between standard React/npm source code and a minimal Kudzu application model, aiming to stay broadly compatible without recreating the overhead it was built to avoid.