imba VS Preact

Compare imba vs Preact and see what are their differences.

Preact

⚛️ Fast 3kB React alternative with the same modern API. Components & Virtual DOM. (by preactjs)
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imba Preact
45 111
6,234 36,062
0.2% 0.3%
9.4 9.3
4 days ago 3 days ago
JavaScript JavaScript
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

imba

Posts with mentions or reviews of imba. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-02.
  • Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
    56 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2023
    Imba. The best web programming language ever made.

    https://imba.io/

  • Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023
    I agree. I was looking for the same thing.

    They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.

  • Imba – The friendly full-stack language
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 25 Sep 2023
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023
  • Clojure is a product design tool
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2023
  • Fore – Declarative user interfaces in plain HTML
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jun 2023
  • Framework for a frontend-only project?
    5 projects | /r/Frontend | 15 Apr 2023
    You might get away with Svelte (not Sveltekit) here since it compiles down to javascript. Another fun framework to try out for this might be https://imba.io/, which also has an option to compile things down to pure HTML, CSS & JS (plus it’s very fun to work with).
  • Thoughts on Svelte
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2023
    I've been using Svelte exclusively for the past 3 years or so. I love it and will keep using it as my main solution for interactivity. It's fast to use and execute, produces small apps, and it's extremely economical in how you express components.

    The confusion the author expresses with $: reactive statements and store auto subscription with the $ are unwarranted IMO. It's really just a lack of familiarity but this kind of stuff becomes intuitive very quickly.

    My criticism of Svelte is rather that they haven't gone deep enough into the compiler-based approach.

    Would be great if there were something like .svelteStore files where you had all the automatic reactivity tracking without having to use a component. Or some kind of improvements into writing styles. With a compiler you can do anything you want and I think Svelte has been a bit timid, maybe to not scare people away.

    For example Imba[1] also bet on a compiler-based approach (years before Svelte existed) and created their own language/framework/compiler. They have come up with amazing solutions to many problems. It's a shame they bet on Ruby aesthetics though and also that they aren't investing into marketing/docs.

    Of course, one might argue that using a compiler is a bad idea for a number of reasons. And yeah of course there are objective issues to any approach, but you have to pick your poison. All in all, Svelte has made me tremendously productive compared to using other solutions for years (React, Vue, Mithril, Inferno, etc).

    I will say though that I would rather use a solution that doesn't have any reactivity at all. Mithril and Imba have this concept of just "redrawing the whole thing" like a game GUI without having to worry about reactivity. Cognitively speaking, no reactivity is the best mental model IMO. With any reactive solution, it's very easy to fall into complex reactive dependencies which can be hard to track. The author of Imba has a video from 2018 where he talks about this[2].

    [1] https://imba.io/

    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwoApTLvRdQ

  • The Io Language
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2023
    A code snippet showing a simple program right on the home page and "selling" whatever features makes it special would go a long way. It's quite off-putting to have to delve deep into a guide in order to get a feel for a language.

    Some examples done right:

    https://lfe.io

    https://elixir-lang.org

    https://imba.io

    https://ocaml.org

  • Why do so many CS grads seem to look down on webdev?
    2 projects | /r/webdev | 10 Jan 2023
    At the same time, my heart is kind of in the web stuff and I find it a lot more exciting personally so it's hard for me to leave. You can do so much more with web tech and all the new ideas Tcoming from it and the pace it's developing is really . I just don't understand why React is becoming the standard when it's a complete nightmare compared to where we should be. I mean, this is literally insane, especially when things like Svelte exist - or even better, Imba. The day Imba becomes the standard is the day I love web dev again.

Preact

Posts with mentions or reviews of Preact. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-23.
  • Preact vs React: A Comparative Guide
    2 projects | dev.to | 23 Apr 2024
    In this post, we get to know more about Preact, one of this year's trending libraries. And we'll compare it to React to see which one suits better for our projects.
  • Episode 24/13: Native Signals, Details on Angular/Wiz, Alan Agius on the Angular CLI
    11 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    Similarly to Promises/A+, this effort focuses on aligning the JavaScript ecosystem. If this alignment is successful, then a standard could emerge, based on that experience. Several framework authors are collaborating here on a common model which could back their reactivity core. The current draft is based on design input from the authors/maintainers of Angular, Bubble, Ember, FAST, MobX, Preact, Qwik, RxJS, Solid, Starbeam, Svelte, Vue, Wiz, and more…
  • Proposal: Signals as a Built-In Primitive of JavaScript
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2024
    Those who want to develop a library that can be used by any other reactive framework. I often see SignalLike type that tries to subtype it.

    https://github.com/preactjs/preact/blob/757746a915d186a90954...

  • Preact: Lightweight React Alternative
    1 project | dev.to | 27 Jan 2024
    The official Preact documentation.
  • How I built a cross-framework frontend library
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    At the very bottom of the image, there are 3 blocks that I chose to call application components. If you are building a cross-framework library, these can be built with whatever tools you want! Only catch is, all the tools you use to build it, will be needed by everyone consuming it. So choose wisely, and be mindful of how many kilobytes of third party code you will need in order to ship. In Schedule-X, I chose to use Preact. You will probably be fine with most lightweight virtual DOM libraries, and just like with frameworks there are a few to pick from.
  • React Jam just started, making a game in 13 days with React
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    >> React is not traditionally used for making games, but that's part of the fun and the challenge. R

    > MS Flight Simulator cockpits are built with MSFS Avionics Framework which is React-like and MIT licensed:

    https://github.com/microsoft/msfs-avionics-mirror/tree/main/...

    preactjs may or may not be faster: https://preactjs.com/

    Million.js is faster than preact, and lists a number of references under Acknowledgements: https://github.com/aidenybai/million#acknowledgments

    https://million.dev/docs :

    > We use a novel approach to the virtual DOM called the block virtual DOM. You can read more on what the block virtual DOM is with Virtual DOM: Back in Block and how we make it happen in React with Behind the block().*

    React API reference > Components > Profiler:

  • Have You Built with Preact?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Dec 2023
  • Quando um framework é melhor que a manipulação nativa do DOM
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2023
  • HTML Data Attributes: One of the Original State Management Libraries
    5 projects | dev.to | 29 Nov 2023
    DEV is a Rails monolith, which uses Preact in the front-end using islands architecture. The reason why I mention all this is that it's not a full-stack JavaScript application, and there is no state management library like Redux or Zustand in use. The data store, for the most part on the front end, is all data attributes.
  • Show HN: Cami.js – A No Build, Web Component Based Reactive Framework
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing imba and Preact you can also consider the following projects:

js-framework-benchmark - A comparison of the performance of a few popular javascript frameworks

react-18 - Workgroup for React 18 release.

React - The library for web and native user interfaces.

Alpine.js - A rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup.

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.

solid - A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

svelte-preprocess - A ✨ magical ✨ Svelte preprocessor with sensible defaults and support for: PostCSS, SCSS, Less, Stylus, Coffeescript, TypeScript, Pug and much more.

lit - Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.

coffeescript - Unfancy JavaScript

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps

htmx - </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

Vue.js - This is the repo for Vue 2. For Vue 3, go to https://github.com/vuejs/core