Preact VS lit

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.

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…

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...

The official Preact documentation.

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 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:

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.

That is the reason why I experiment with the TiniJS framework for a while. It is a collection of tools for developing web/desktop/mobile apps using the native Web Component technology, based on the Lit library. Thank you the Lit team for creating a great tool assists us working with standard Web Component easier.

https://github.com/lit/lit/tree/main/packages/labs/virtualiz...

actually, looking at it (https://lit.dev/), i do exactly that.

I also define a `render()` and extend my own parent, which does a `replaceChildren()` with the render. And, strangely, I also call the processor `html`

I'll still stick with mine however, my 'framework' is half-page of code. I dislike dependencies greatly. I'd need to be saving thousand+ lines at least.

Here, I don't want a build system to make a website; that's mad. So I don't want lit. I want the 5 lines it takes to invoke a dom parser, and the 5 lines it takes do define a webcomp parent.

I rather like https://lit.dev/ for web components so far.

For the reactivity stuff, you might want to read https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-reactivi... - it shows a bunch of no-library-required patterns that, while in a number of cases I'd much rather use a library myself, all seems at least -basically- reasonable to me and will probably be far more comprehensible to you than whatever I'd reach for, and frameworks are always much more pleasant to approach after you've already done a bunch of stuff by banging rocks together first.

I work on Lit, which I would hesitate to call a framework, but gives a framework-like DX for building web components, while trying to keep opinions to a minimum and lock-in as low as possible.

It's got reactivity, declarative templates, great performance, SSR, TypeScript support, native CSS encapsulation, context, tasks, and more.

It's used to build Material Design, settings and devtools UIs for Chrome, some UI for Firefox, Reddit, Photoshop Web...

https://lit.dev if you're interested.

I am more a fan of the augmented style because it doesn't entrap you in dev lock-in to platforms.

The problem with frameworks, especially web frameworks, is they reimplement many items that are standard now (shadowdom, components, storage, templating, base libraries, class/async, network/realtime etc).

If you like the component style of other frameworks but want to use Web Components, Google Lit is quite nice.

Google Lit is like a combination of HTML Web Components and React/Vue style components. The great part is it is build on Web Components underneath.

[1] https://lit.dev/

From the comments I see here, it seems like people expect the Webcomponents API to be a complete replacement for a JS framework. The thing is, our frameworks should start making use of modern web APIs, so the frameworks will have to do less themselves, so can be smaller. Lit [0] for example is doing this. Using Lit is very similar to using React. Some things work different, and you have to get used to some web component specific things, but once you get it, I think it's way more pleasant to work with than React. It feels more natural, native, less framework-specific.

For state management, I created LitState [1], a tiny library (really only 258 lines), which integrates nicely with Lit, and which makes state management between multiple components very easy. It's much easier than the Redux/flux workflows found in React.

So my experience with this is that it's much nicer to work with, and that the libraries are way smaller.

[0] https://lit.dev/