Mithril vs React

Overview

React

Stacks182.6K

Followers147.0K

Votes4.1K

GitHub Stars240.3K

Forks49.7K

Mithril

Stacks89

Followers79

Votes86

Mithril vs React: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Mithril and React are popular JavaScript libraries used for building interactive web interfaces. While they have similarities in their core functionality, there are key differences that developers need to be aware of when choosing between the two.

1. **Virtual DOM Handling**: React utilizes a virtual DOM to efficiently update and render changes to the actual DOM, optimizing performance by minimizing actual DOM manipulation. On the other hand, Mithril incorporates its own virtual DOM implementation which is highly optimized for performance, resulting in faster rendering times compared to React in certain scenarios.

2. **Size and Footprint**: Mithril is known for its small size and minimalistic approach, with the core library being lightweight and easy to integrate into projects without adding unnecessary bloat. In contrast, React has a larger footprint due to its extensive feature set and additional functionalities provided by the ecosystem, making it better suited for complex applications that require a wide range of tools and capabilities.

3. **Learning Curve**: React's component-based architecture and JSX syntax can have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to the library or the concept of component-based UI development. Mithril, on the other hand, has a simpler API and a more straightforward approach to building applications, making it easier for beginners to grasp and get started with.

4. **Community and Ecosystem**: React has a larger and more established community with a wide range of third-party libraries, tools, and resources available for developers to leverage. This extensive ecosystem provides React developers with a wealth of options and support when building applications. Mithril, while not as widely adopted, still has an active community and growing ecosystem that continues to improve over time.

5. **Concurrency Model**: React introduced Concurrent Mode to handle concurrent rendering in a more efficient and user-friendly manner, allowing developers to prioritize and schedule updates based on user interactions. Mithril, on the other hand, follows a simpler approach to concurrency without the advanced features provided by Concurrent Mode in React, which can be beneficial for projects that do not require complex rendering optimizations.

6. **State Management**: React relies on external libraries like Redux or Context API for state management, offering developers flexibility in choosing the most suitable solution for their needs. In contrast, Mithril provides in-built state management capabilities through m.redraw() and m.withAttr() methods, simplifying the process of managing and updating application state without the need for additional libraries.

In Summary, Mithril and React differ in virtual DOM handling, size and footprint, learning curve, community and ecosystem, concurrency model, and state management approaches.

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Advice on React, Mithril

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

React

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k

Comments

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k

Comments

Malek

Web developer at Quicktext

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

244k views244k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

React	Mithril
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.	Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.
Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere	Only 12kb gzipped, no dependencies;Small API, small learning curve;Safe-by-default templates;Hierarchical MVC via components;Virtual DOM diffing and compilable templates;Intelligent auto-redrawing system
Statistics
GitHub Stars 240.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 49.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 182.6K	Stacks 89
Followers 147.0K	Followers 79
Votes 4.1K	Votes 86
Pros & Cons
Pros 837 Components 674 Virtual dom 579 Performance 509 Simplicity 442 Composable Cons 41 Requires discipline to keep architecture organized 30 No predefined way to structure your app 29 Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages 13 JSX 10 Not enterprise friendly	Pros 16 Lightweight 12 Faster than React 10 Pure JavaScript 10 Virtual Dom 8 Robust Cons 1 Virtual Dom
Integrations
No integrations available	TypeScript JavaScript

What are some alternatives to React, Mithril?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Related Comparisons

Mithril vs React: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Mithril and React are popular JavaScript libraries used for building interactive web interfaces. While they have similarities in their core functionality, there are key differences that developers need to be aware of when choosing between the two.

1. **Virtual DOM Handling**: React utilizes a virtual DOM to efficiently update and render changes to the actual DOM, optimizing performance by minimizing actual DOM manipulation. On the other hand, Mithril incorporates its own virtual DOM implementation which is highly optimized for performance, resulting in faster rendering times compared to React in certain scenarios.

2. **Size and Footprint**: Mithril is known for its small size and minimalistic approach, with the core library being lightweight and easy to integrate into projects without adding unnecessary bloat. In contrast, React has a larger footprint due to its extensive feature set and additional functionalities provided by the ecosystem, making it better suited for complex applications that require a wide range of tools and capabilities.

3. **Learning Curve**: React's component-based architecture and JSX syntax can have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to the library or the concept of component-based UI development. Mithril, on the other hand, has a simpler API and a more straightforward approach to building applications, making it easier for beginners to grasp and get started with.

4. **Community and Ecosystem**: React has a larger and more established community with a wide range of third-party libraries, tools, and resources available for developers to leverage. This extensive ecosystem provides React developers with a wealth of options and support when building applications. Mithril, while not as widely adopted, still has an active community and growing ecosystem that continues to improve over time.

5. **Concurrency Model**: React introduced Concurrent Mode to handle concurrent rendering in a more efficient and user-friendly manner, allowing developers to prioritize and schedule updates based on user interactions. Mithril, on the other hand, follows a simpler approach to concurrency without the advanced features provided by Concurrent Mode in React, which can be beneficial for projects that do not require complex rendering optimizations.

6. **State Management**: React relies on external libraries like Redux or Context API for state management, offering developers flexibility in choosing the most suitable solution for their needs. In contrast, Mithril provides in-built state management capabilities through m.redraw() and m.withAttr() methods, simplifying the process of managing and updating application state without the need for additional libraries.

In Summary, Mithril and React differ in virtual DOM handling, size and footprint, learning curve, community and ecosystem, concurrency model, and state management approaches.

Mithril vs React

Overview