ByteDance Modern Web Development Survey Report (2021)

The survey, presented at GMTC Beijing 2021, collected 612 valid responses about modern web development practices among developers at ByteDance and the broader Chinese community.

Programming Languages – ES6+ (88.4%) and TypeScript (77.63%) are the clear majority, while nearly half still select ES5. Among non‑JS languages, Python (12.75%), Go (11.11%) and Rust (7.35%) lead, with Java appearing in the "Other Languages" category (6.54%).

CSS Technologies – Less (59.8%) and SCSS (55.72%) remain the most used preprocessors, followed by CSS Modules (51.14%) and PostCSS (38.24%). Styled‑components are used by 34.31% of respondents, with a notable overlap with CSS Modules, indicating a hybrid approach to modular styling.

UI Technologies – React (80.07%) and Vue (65.2%) dominate the front‑end framework landscape. TypeScript users favor React (87.63%) over Vue (63.54%). Vanilla JS usage rises among ES5 users, and Electron is the most popular cross‑platform technology (17.48%).

State Management & Data Logic – Redux is the leading state management solution (55.56%), closely followed by MobX, Vuex, and Hooks + Context. Most Redux users also use React, while Vue users prefer Vuex. Emerging tools such as RTK, Dva, React Query, Recoil, and RxJS show modest adoption.

Server‑Side Development – Front‑end developers mainly need BFF APIs (73.53%), with REST APIs (66.18%) being the most common, followed by WebSocket (30.56%) and GraphQL (14.38%). SSR adoption exceeds static and dynamic HTML, and Koa (54.74%) and Express (49.51%) are the top Node frameworks.

Engineering Tools – Webpack dominates build tools (94.28%), with Vite (35.62%) and ESBuild (22.71%) gaining traction. Frameworks such as Umi (25.33%) and Next.js (16.5%) are popular, and micro‑frontend and monorepo practices are adopted by about a quarter of respondents.

R&D Environment – VSCode is the primary IDE (91.67%) while Prettier (42.97%) surpasses ESLint (39.71%) in adoption, indicating strong formatting preferences.

The findings align with the expectations of the Modern.js project, confirming the relevance of its design goals and highlighting areas for future improvement.