[bfsg]

Hmm, this feels very misleading. What is the correlation between Github stars and real world usage? This is not statistics, it's just 1 variable.. It almost feels like Vue.js is going to take over React just because it received more Github stars? I use React already for years, never gave it a star on Github, and I think many with me.

[mlsarecmg]

Stars are pretty useless for what they wanted to measure. Real-world data paints a different picture http://www.npmtrends.com/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-vs-@angular...

Even searching Github for 'import React from 'react' and 'import Vue from 'vue' results in similar percentages. Roughly 7-8 million projects in Github on React, under a million on Vue.

Despite the hype, Vue has been mostly a flat over the last 2 years with a slight upward bend, but only to the point where it begins to catch up with the old Angular 1.x.

[pablobaz]

From your link, in the last year alone Vue has had approximately a 5-fold increase in the number of downloads.

Describing this trend as "mostly flat with a slight upward bend." is very misleading.

[mlsarecmg]

See it in context. The fastest growing framework on npm right now for instance is Preact (as per official report posted by Lauri Voss last week), but Preacts userbase is so small that it could grow hundredfold with insane growth rates percentually without scratching a competitor. That also applies to Vue. React gets more users in a week than Vue in its entire lifespan.

Go 2 years back on that page and you see a clearer picture, yes it did grow, but relatively contained compared to its competitors, specifically React.

And is it any wonder to anyone? I really ask myself. Would you go back to a stryingly typed templating framework with a complex api and ever changing ruleset, reliant on dependency injection and all the other stuff we went through with Angular? I don't think anyone would. It rather looks like Vue is catching the last remaining Angular 1.x refugees, but there isn't an ever increasing supply of those.

[chrisco255]

To be fair, Vue did embrace JSX in it's 2.0 release. I think Vue is leaps and bounds ahead of Angular in elegance and usability. I like Vue, I just don't think it has the ecosystem that React has. Maybe it will catch up eventually.

[bpicolo]

I don't think it needs the ecosystem React has. It has all of the components you need to build excellent software - great debugging experiences, testing, routing, state management. At that point it doesn't really matter all that much what else you've got.

[mlsarecmg]

Honestly that is like saying Windows Phone doesn't need the apps.

React has a self sufficient cross platform eco system. I don't think people using primarily web frameworks even realize the implications of that yet. React works outside of the browser, and not just natively on mobile but literally everywhere. Imagine you use React as you always would to make a native command line application (https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed), but now you want to have a store or move things around, so you `npm install react-redux react-motion` and you just apply it (https://github.com/gaearon/react-blessed-hot-motion). Look at the code and try to picture the overhead if you had to do this in C++.

Being able to transfer code and knowledge, and seeing new renderers pop up for the wildest platforms each day, as well as official renderers made by big vendors (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows), the idea of a web-bound Angular-like framework seems odd in 2018. I wouldn't expect Vue to get the same kind of popularity without at least competing or doing something new.

[azemetre]

Does this account for development done in Eastern Asia/China? It's my understanding that Chinese developers have heavily embraced vue over react and I don't know what limitations the great firewall has on frontend tools like npm or repositories such as github, maybe the stats are biased towards Western development.

[mlsarecmg]

Github and Npm are both used in China all the same. I don't know about firewall restrictions, many chinese companies publish directly on Github. React is the most used in China in polls as well (stateofJS), with some of the biggest names and websites using it. If China would be excluded in these stats, that would impact Reacts outlook more for sure, any exception one could make would directly affect React in the same way.

As it stands npms numbers coincide with all the other sources you could pull: projects on github, tracked project dependencies, size of eco system, job market, etc.

[azemetre]

I see, I wasn't too sure.

I think I was overstating Alibaba and Tencent's use of Vue with that of other Chinese developers or software shops.