windicss VS linaria

why not use Windi CSS or Tailwind css?

Windi CSS, in contrast to Tachyons, is a very fresh framework. Started in the late December of 2020, it’s already gained a lot of attention and currently sits at respectable 1.5K GitHub stars.

No mention of Windi CSS? Didn't it inspire this?

However I decided it was time to question my own biases. I installed Tailwind Intellisense for VS Code and started up a test project with a starter that included Tailwind (actually it uses Windi, which is a Tailwind compiler). I then started making a basic site, forcing myself to use the utility classes for (most) all of the styling.

For more details, please check windicss

You can check the README of windicss (https://github.com/voorjaar/windicss). Compared with postcss, it runs faster, can be built in real time and does not require plugins such as autoprefixer and purgecss to increase the complexity of configuration. And windicss extends the utilities and variants of tailwindcss. For example, you can directly use p-1.3rem or bg-hex-fff just like atomic css. And we also have a compilation mode, which can combine a line of classes into one to increase the readability of html.

I wasn't alone facing this issue. Zero-runtime CSS-in-JS promised to solve it. Solutions like Linaria and Pigment-CSS (MUI's Emotion successor) extract CSS at build time, generating static stylesheets while preserving the CSS-in-JS developer experience.

We're going to investigate the difference in performance between Tailwind and Linaria. Tailwind, you already know. And Linaria has been getting quite a lot of traction since styled components went into maintenance mode recently. We'll cover why Linaria is a good choice for this comparison a bit further.

Static extraction libraries like Linaria (2020) and Vanilla Extract (2021) later minimized runtime costs.

Linaria Linaria is a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library. It allows developers to write CSS in JavaScript without a runtime overhead, compiling styles to plain CSS at build time.

The code duplication occurred due to disabling the default code splitting algorithm in Next.js. Previous developers used this approach to make Linaria work, which is designed to improve productivity. However, disabling code splitting led to a decrease in performance.

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

I like Linaria [0] because your IDE typechecks your styles and gives you autocomplete/intellisense when typing styles. With Tailwind you have to look everything up in docs because it's all strings, not importable constants. Leads to a lot of bugs from typos that aren't a thing with type checked styles.

[0] https://github.com/callstack/linaria

And if you're wondering why I'm not using something like Linaria or some other runtime-less CSS-in-JS tool, it's simply because I don't want to have to spend my time setting things up and working around stuff and all that jazz. I just want something that works, and I've already got a personal scaffold for getting SC to work out of the box with Next, so, right now, it's either that or sticking to CSS/SCSS/SASS. For me, that is. I know it's such a small thing, but, honestly, one less headache for me is 2 steps forward.