Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tobr 4059 days ago
What makes you like Mithril more? I've been looking at it for a while, and it seems very nice and lightweight.

All I really want is an easy way to get performant DOM manipulations. With React I have to build the whole view around the component system, which isn't so flexible. Am I right in thinking that Mithril allows you to put the view together any way you want, as long as the end result is an object it can diff into the DOM?
2 comments
nwenzel 4059 days ago
D3 can do DOM manipulation a. It's more well known for its charting (SVG) functionality. But I've used it to build tables and other data-based DOM structures.

It's not ideal for all use cases. But for updating the DOM based on changes to the data, I find it to be a useful option.

Square built and fast library on top of D3 called Crossfilter. Speed is pretty amazing when you see the data source. http://square.github.io/crossfilter/

link
pygy_ 4059 days ago
> Am I right in thinking that Mithril allows you to put the view together any way you want, as long as the end result is an object it can diff into the DOM?

That's correct. Virtual DOM nodes are plain JS objects with `tag`, `attr` and `children` attributes (the last two being optional).

The `m()` helper gives you some sugar on top of that.

Idiomatic Mithril view code, however, is more about declaratively generating vDOM nodes based on a model and/or a view model than, say, jQuery-style DOM manipulations...

link