uix VS Preact

> But Reagent supports functional components as well, with hooks and all.

I addressed this already: while reagent is able to emit function components, there is a performance penalty to this.[1]

> I also very much like Hiccup, and so do many of us, because code is data and data is code, and Helix has decided not to support that.

Hiccup is convenient to write, but it is a constant run-time cost and a significant storage cost given that you have to store long series of constructors to cljs.core.PersistentVector in your bundle, have the JS runtime actually construct the vector, then pass it through a Hiccup interpreter to finally produce DOM nodes and throw away the persistent vector, only to repeat this entire process again on re-render.[2]

> Helix has decided not to support that.

That is simply not true. From the Helix documentation[2],

> If you want to use libraries like sablono, hicada or even hx hiccup parser, you can easily add that by creating a custom macro.

These are all Hiccup interpreters you can readily use.

IME there is very little difference between using the $ macro in Helix and writing Hiccup. I do not really miss Hiccup when I use Helix, and you still have data as code ;)

While this is from an unrelated project, there are benchmarks[3] done against Reagent that demonstrate the sheer overhead it has. In practice it is not a big problem if you rarely trigger a re-render, but otherwise it is a non-trivial cost, and if you want to use modern React features (like Suspense), there is a lot of r/as-element mingling going on, converting cases, etc. that simply make Reagent feel more tedious to use than Helix.

Also, the newer UIx2, which largely borrows from Helix, is "3.2x faster than Reagent" according to one of the contributors.[4]

I think it'd be worthwhile to benchmark all of these libraries against each other and record the data in one place. Maybe I'll get around to doing it this weekend :)

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[1] https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/blob/master/doc/R...

[2] https://github.com/lilactown/helix/blob/master/docs/faq.md#w...

[3] https://github.com/roman01la/uix#benchmarks

[4] https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/pull/12

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.