[nogridbag]

I recently rediscovered Mithril.

I needed to build a fairly complex tree-table in our legacy ES5 app and I initially turned to Vue to build the first prototype. I'm a big fan of Vue, but for the first time with Vue I found myself really fighting against the framework. In particular Vue's templating system and lack of template fragments make it hard to create complex HTML table elements as they require a strict structure. Another issue is our ES5 app already has its own build system so we'd either be stuck with using Vue without Webpack (which in Vue is a really inferior experience) or attempting to use both build systems which is a bit cumbersome.

While researching Vue template fragments I discovered Mithril has had support for fragments since its inception (React recently also added support for fragments). I had always discounted Mithril. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the simple homepage, the seemingly brief documentation, hyperscript, or the lack of HN hype. Wow was I ever so wrong. The documentation is short because the API surface area is tiny and this is a GOOD thing. I never felt like I was writing framework code or trying to figure out the Mithril way of doing things. It pretty much gets out of your way. Hyperscript, which I thought I would hate, turned out to be one of my favorite parts of using Mithril especially when I paired it with Tailwind CSS. Since Hyperscript is pure JavaScript, doesn't require a build step, and is the standard way of writing Mithril components, integrating Mithril into our legacy JS app was absolutely dead simple.