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Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

mithril.js.org

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Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#11

Post by jcelerier »

aetherspawn wrote: post #2

We shipped a very major product (300 person company) on Mithril.js a few years back when React was young and Angular was the go-to in this space. We had a fairly positive experience, but ran into enough problems here and there with vdom rendering bugs that we eventually decided to rewrite the entire product 4 years later in React. Certainly, it did was it was supposed to very well, until we really pushed it to its li…

ten years ago I was writing UIs in Qt, given that comment in ten years I'm confident I'll still be writing UIs in Qt

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#12

Post by shivekkhurana »

jcelerier wrote: post #11
aetherspawn wrote: post #2

We shipped a very major product (300 person company) on Mithril.js a few years back when React was young and Angular was the go-to in this space. We had a fairly positive experience, but ran into enough problems here and there with vdom rendering bugs that we eventually decided to rewrite the entire product 4 years later in React. Certainly, it did was it was supposed to very well, until we really pushed it to its li…

ten years ago I was writing UIs in Qt, given that comment in ten years I'm confident I'll still be writing UIs in Qt

Is it possible to HTML DOM apps in Qt? Is there any blog/book/video that you'd recommend a Qt noob?

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#13

Post by deergomoo »

wruza wrote: post #5

If you want to try mithril in a mid-sized project, sure do it, cause it is a nice, free as in freedom library to render vdoms without imposed opinion on how to manage state. But be aware that it has no error handling around view() method and any error thrown from there will irreversibly break mithril internals everywhere on the page, this is by design. Second thing, I didn’t push it to the limit as another commenter,…

> similar to vue and/or react, wish these two had their render cycles as separate packages

Not sure if it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but Vue 3 separates its core into independent modules that you can use outside of Vue if you want to.

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#14

Post by ha4fsd3fas »

wruza wrote: post #8
turblety wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but massive vdoms (many tens of thousands of vnodes) are slow to even rebuild and compare Sounds like a terrible user experiance? Would you mind educating me on an appropriate scenario where you may need tens of thousands of vnodes? Maybe large unpaginated tables? A chat panel where you have scrolled through a large history? Even if a framework like React can handle that many nodes, surely there must be better ways…

It was a master-detail “form”, rich-formatted financial records in the left pane and svg-heavy graphs for attributing records to edges on the right. Already heavily filtered on both sides, and required to be navigatable without constantly changing subfilters. Estimating, every left row could consist of 15-20 vnodes and every graph of around 50+ min. I think I’ve seen 12-15k vnodes on average day, depending on how muc…

Sounds like a good usecase for some framework without vdom like Svelte.

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#15

Post by lhorie »

aetherspawn wrote: post #2

We shipped a very major product (300 person company) on Mithril.js a few years back when React was young and Angular was the go-to in this space. We had a fairly positive experience, but ran into enough problems here and there with vdom rendering bugs that we eventually decided to rewrite the entire product 4 years later in React. Certainly, it did was it was supposed to very well, until we really pushed it to its li…

Mithril author here. Curious what version you were using. There have been some notable internal changes to the engine over the years.

The 1.0 release was a complete rewrite of the previous codebase, and included a very aggressive optimization inspired by inferno.js (called node recycling) that turned out to cause issues in some edge cases and didn't materialize significant enough performance benefits given the added internal complexity. I suspect that this is what was causing you grief.

This optimization has since been removed.

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#16

Post by christophilus »

I’d like to use a simple front end library that doesn’t use a vdom, doesn’t require a special state system, doesn’t require special compilation, is performant, and largely gets out of my way.

I currently use Preact and am pretty happy with it, even though it doesn’t check most of those boxes. Is there something that does?

Anyway, Mithril looks nice. I’ve kicked the tires a few times, but comments like the ones here in this thread have prevented me from adopting it.

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#17

Post by lhorie »

wruza wrote: post #8
turblety wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but massive vdoms (many tens of thousands of vnodes) are slow to even rebuild and compare Sounds like a terrible user experiance? Would you mind educating me on an appropriate scenario where you may need tens of thousands of vnodes? Maybe large unpaginated tables? A chat panel where you have scrolled through a large history? Even if a framework like React can handle that many nodes, surely there must be better ways…

It was a master-detail “form”, rich-formatted financial records in the left pane and svg-heavy graphs for attributing records to edges on the right. Already heavily filtered on both sides, and required to be navigatable without constantly changing subfilters. Estimating, every left row could consist of 15-20 vnodes and every graph of around 50+ min. I think I’ve seen 12-15k vnodes on average day, depending on how muc…

Humongous DOMs eventually stop scaling even without any javascript on the page (e.g. look at how long it takes to load the ecmascript spec), so it's definitely important to account for DOM size early in design.

With that said, for mithril specifically, there are a few different techniques that I've heard people use to avoid overly slow diff times:

- design changes (search, filtering, pagination, etc)

- occlusion culling (basically render only list items that are actually visible on screen)

- islands (basically mount a sub-app onto a vnode.dom so that it renders independently without forcing a rerender of the parent app; this takes advantage of the idea that data-down, events-up is a pattern that works across sub-app boundaries)

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#18

Post by mozey »

christophilus wrote: post #16

I’d like to use a simple front end library that doesn’t use a vdom, doesn’t require a special state system, doesn’t require special compilation, is performant, and largely gets out of my way. I currently use Preact and am pretty happy with it, even though it doesn’t check most of those boxes. Is there something that does? Anyway, Mithril looks nice. I’ve kicked the tires a few times, but comments like the ones here i…

"Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost. You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit... Alpine doesn't use a virtual DOM. This implementation allows Alpine to stay rugged and use the real DOM to work its magic" https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#19

Post by yagodragon »

Right now Next.js might be the hottest front end framework but I'm looking for something simpler to build SPA's. I'm not interested in SSR or SSG at all. Mithril.js looks very promising as it provides you with everything you might need to build a simple web app out of the box. The only other frameworks that do that is Angular and Ember, but they're both declining in popularity especially Ember. On the other hand React.js has CRA that is very complicated and doesn't even come with routing out of the box. Is there any other good and modern SPA framework out there?

Re: Alternative lightweight UI library to modern day frameworks

#20

Post by christophilus »

mozey wrote: post #18
christophilus wrote: post #16

I’d like to use a simple front end library that doesn’t use a vdom, doesn’t require a special state system, doesn’t require special compilation, is performant, and largely gets out of my way. I currently use Preact and am pretty happy with it, even though it doesn’t check most of those boxes. Is there something that does? Anyway, Mithril looks nice. I’ve kicked the tires a few times, but comments like the ones here i…

"Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost. You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit... Alpine doesn't use a virtual DOM. This implementation allows Alpine to stay rugged and use the real DOM to work its magic" https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine

I’ve seen Alpine, and it is interesting, but another bullet point in my wish list is vanilla JS; no new template language. JSX is just a small bit of sugar on top of vanilla JS, in my mind, so it is acceptable.
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