[nojvek]

React as an API is brilliant. A Couple of methods only. The libraries conform to the API and achieve different things. Preact is react but simple. It's very lightweight, readable and gets the job done. Inferno is heavily optimized at the cost of readability. React is the original project which is now a monolith. Smaller than angular but still big.

Remember on average every 1Mb of JS Will take about a second to parse and initialize. Smaller, we'll architected libraries like preact and mithriill means you can make pages load within a blink of an eye.

[trueadm]

Inferno is 8kb, it's smaller than the Mithril re-write and is on par with Preact in terms of parse performance. I think you may have looked at the older Inferno codebase, as the current one is very slim and readable.

[lukeed]

Size isn't everything ;-)

A smaller footprint _does_ usually signify a faster load time, but that can easily be overruled by how its internals are parsed (aka, interpreted by the browser).

For example, 1kb script can intentionally block the mainframe for 10seconds, thus making it slower than a 40kb moderate-performing competitor.

Inferno is optimized for the entire performance profile. Preact may load & parse faster -- but only by a HAIR (10-50ms). Inferno does everything else much faster.

So, do you consider the `load` event (which will occur once in the UX) to be more valuable than the every other interaction?

[nojvek]

Inferno only works super fast if you use the babel transpiler that creates the blueprint calls. While this is a great idea, debugging it is a nightmare at times.

I'd rather have simple h or createElement calls. I personally prefer Typescript jsx as all my Components are type validate and refactoring is a breeze.

What I like about preact is its simplicity. I can debug preact and figure out what's going on. Inferno on the other hand seems a bit like assembly. Reusing property names across different contexts is a no-no in my book.

I once worked on a database with generic extra_1 extra_2,... fields. They were abused pretty bad and only one guy knew what they meant in what context.

While trueadm is a perf wizard I would definitely love to see some of the opts being done at the V8/chakra level rather than obfuscated js code.

[trueadm]

This isn't true anymore. Blueprints were removed from Inferno quite some time ago. Inferno uses createVNode calls, which are very much like createElement calls.