riot VS hyperapp

how about getting a hold of your sanity and allowing yourself a few hours to learn https://riot.js.org/ - almost no learning curve, only pure awesomeness. even if you won't use it in the enterprise (because policies, bla bla), it is still worth knowing things can be done differently - in a good way.

Riot.js prides itself as a light and simple UI library that helps developers hit the ground running when creating elegant UIs for their applications.

Thanks! Glad you like it. I'm the original author of Riot (https://riot.js.org/) so that's the style of frontend development I'm most comfortable with. We're using our own flavour of the library, which has the original super-mimimalistic feel on it.

The likely reason it never caught on, is that it has similar pitfalls as Backbone:

- manually attaching DOM elements to view controllers

- manually attaching child views

- models which have to be wired individually via .listenTo

- possibility of infinite loops if the events accidentally recurse

A better tiny alternative would be hyperapp[1] or even Preact, that has a similar bundle size.

[1] https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp

If they're focused on performance and bundle size, it's your chance to try some minimalistic exotic stuff like hyperapp (https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp) or mithril (https://mithril.js.org/) Just for fun

With a bit of a deadline (due to a mixture of procrastination and confidence that Vue would work) I needed something quick. I have also used Hyperapp in the past but that looks like a dead project right now (although arguably it has all the functionality you need so why keep developing it?).

I’m glad it left that impression! My thoughts have clarified a bit since I read that post, and I think what I describe is more declarative, like React. But the best places to read about it (for web devs) are in Elm!

There is also this new thing I found that seems to really lean into the core of what being functional means here: https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp

After a while, you see that basically all systems can be modeled as event-driven, functional systems. It’s a flexible model, and fits beautiful into web dev where the semantics are very clear: the system is the web app and events are clicks, keyboard events, asynchronous calls...

Hyperapp is 1kb.

- Hyperapp (https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp) - Preact - Svelte - React / Vue

Personally, I try my best to avoid bringing in dependencies as much as possible, and try to limit my exposure to only dependencies with low/shallow transitive dependency counts. Unfortunately, this is pretty hard, especially in corporate settings. What we need more of are the opposite of what we've been collectively praising: we need more monolithic packages. Case in point: lodash.template is currently vulnerable with no mitigation, even though lodash itself is not. That's just sloppy publishing practices. Esbuild is a great start over the webpack/babel maze of dependencies. There's a stdlib effort along those lines that hopefully would also help. There's a bunch of micro-frameworks that are used in production just fine and have little to no dependencies.

Even better than JSX is straight up hyperscript or something like @hyperapp/html[1]. JSX feels like a cumbersome attachment in comparison.

[1] https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp/tree/main/packages/...

> JSX is valid JS. It is converted down to the same thing as what you describe, function calls to React.createElement().

This is disingenuous. Browsers do not understand JSX, nor do most JavaScript engines. TypeScript also gets transpiled to JavaScript -- it is not valid JavaScript in and of itself, you require a build step. We can argue semantics, but I think it's pretty clear what I meant.

> You could even alias all the elements to function names

You've just recreated what I mentioned two comments above in this same comments thread. :) See: https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp/tree/main/packages/...

This is what I'm arguing for over something like JSX.

Using a proxy to create elements! While this clearly applies to Hyperapp (a "tiny framework for building hypertext applications"), there's no reason why this couldn't apply to vanilla JS.