[kristiandupont]

This is interesting in the same way I find it interesting to write C code to be closer to the hardware but I don't think the "so much smaller footprint" argument is very strong.

jQuery is cached more or less everywhere in every browser and CDN on the planet. Going around it seems silly to me.

[andrethegiant]

Maybe footprint isn't as big of an issue anymore, but memory usage can still be. Including a framework increases the amount of memory a page consumes -- not just by the size of the script in bytes, but by how much memory the objects in that script consume. On phones or other devices memory can be limited.