What's the tradeoff?

[mxstbr]

The readme and website make a bunch of extraordinary claims ("same api, much faster, better browser compat, smaller bundle size"), but what are the tradeoffs of choosing Nerv vs vanilla React? What do I miss when I choose Nerv?

Note: Not trying to be a pain in the butt here, genuinely curious why React wouldn't just take this code base and make it their own

[benjamn]

Just to underscore @mxstbr's point, you lose nothing by documenting the tradeoffs honestly. If your users have to discover those tradeoffs themselves, they won't trust the project anymore, and they will have a very easy time switching back to React, given the API compatibility.

[petermikitsh]

I'd like to see this project runs against the official React test suite, to have a quantifiable measure of knowing how closely this implementation matches official API behavior. If it passed 100%, and offered superior performance / reduced file size, I would be excited to use this.

[dzek69]

I think no 10kb-or-so-react-alternative would have async per frame rendering like React 16 have. Splitting rendering into job chunks that fits 16ms frame isn't that easy. This probably the biggest trade off of every React alternative now. Until R16 it wouldn't be much problem.

[mxstbr]

That is an incredible response, thank you so much @yuche for taking the time to type that out! Again, no hard feelings at all, I totally understand that language can be a big barrier. ❤️

Have a great day!

[dzek69]

Thank you for your reply. So to sum this up the main goals of Nerv are 100% compatibility, free as in freedom license and IE8 support. The trade off is not being well-tested yet and it may not pass all unit tests from React, but are you going to to achieve that as well?

Personally I think this is very interesting project and I'm soon going to publish small isomorphic webpage and I'm obsessed with file sizes as well, but preact forced me to use compatibility package even when I thought it shouldn't be necessary and I'm not satisfied with that. I'll try to use Nerv instead.

[sospedra]

Can we maybe have some numbers? Benchmarking?

[popey456963]

@sospedra There are a few benchmarks on the website main page - https://nerv.aotu.io/

[yuche]

@mxstbr
Thanks for point it out that we do really need a tradeoff description. A good question like this could be very useful to sort things out.
I going to reopen this issue. Any question or criticism is welcomed.

[luckyadam]

@sospedra Yeah, we will show the benchmarks ASAP.
You can see the results at https://nerv.aotu.io/ first.

[ColinEberhardt]

@yuche thanks for the detailed response

If you like the idea of React, but can’t use it for some reason (like Apache, or IE8, size), you should consider choose a React alternative:

On the 'like Apache' note specifically, that refers to React's previous BSD licence. I believe it has moved to MIT.