from Hacker News

InfernoJS – A JavaScript library for building powerful user interfaces

by expression100 on 12/2/16, 3:22 PM with 128 comments

  • by cheapsteak on 12/2/16, 8:20 PM

  • by tzaman on 12/2/16, 5:24 PM

    Here we go again.

    I click the link. Get to an under construction page. Click the link, get to Github, think "this is interesting" to myself. Read on. Find there's a project called Cerebral, which is a state management library for React/Inferno/Whatever. Start thinking there's something wrong with my app, that's "just" about to launch, and is "just" using plain old Redux. And now I'm thinking it's not good enough any more (while remembering I haven't even given a try to redux-saga), and maybe I should try another stack with Inferno/Cerebral?

    Why are you doing this to me, JavaScript?

  • by chickenfries on 12/2/16, 4:43 PM

    From the README

    > Inferno is much smaller in size, 7kb vs 45kb gzip.

    Given that you're building the kind of app that is complicated enough to require a state management library, a virtual dom implementation, etc... does this 38kb really matter? Is anyone really shipping commercial apps where 38kb on page load would be that meaningful of a performance gain? Especially if you're doing serverside rendering and requiring react asynchronously?

  • by trueadm on 12/2/16, 5:23 PM

    Just a note to people expecting an actual website – we are in the process of building one and you can see what it will look like here: https://twitter.com/trueadm/status/802675565421625344

    Furthermore, if anyone has any questions feel free to ask away (I'm the author of Inferno). :)

  • by bsilvereagle on 12/2/16, 4:21 PM

    Might as well link to the GH page (which is available by clicking the icon on the linked page): https://github.com/trueadm/inferno

  • by aargh_aargh on 12/2/16, 4:32 PM

    Considering the lifetime of JS frameworks nowadays, the website has been "coming soon" for ages.

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://infernojs.org/

  • by dirkg on 12/3/16, 1:59 AM

    I don't understand the negativity. This isn't buzzfeed or reddit, the target audience is supposed to be people who are already devs and not need handholding.

    So there's no website. So what? The github page clearly explains what it is, who its for and how it works. Focus on the product, talk about its pros/cons without trying to distract from the core issues.

    e.g. the size complaint - almost every article about React/Angular/Vue will compare the lib sizes and impact on loading etc - Inferno is faster and smaller. Why complain?

    The focus of the library seems to be speed, a minimal implementation that is still fully API compatible with React, which is no mean feat. And on top of that it happens to be the fastest UI framework. Give some credit to the author, FB has already said they might be incorporating ideas from it.

  • by trueadm on 12/2/16, 11:40 PM

    If anyone has any further questions/queries/ideas/rants you can jump on the Inferno Slack - https://inferno-slack.herokuapp.com/.

    The team and I would love to hear from you. We want to make Inferno better and we believe in doing so, we can start a shift in the community that starts to realise that performance on mobile with the current state of libraries and tools is not good enough. This was always the primary goal for why I began Inferno – about 2 years ago.

  • by quickben on 12/2/16, 4:21 PM

    Minor note: the linked url brings to a placeholder page.

  • by mstijak on 12/2/16, 9:09 PM

    Cx widgets mostly work with inferno-compat. There are still some issues to iron out, but hopefully that will be fixed with 1.0. Performance improvement over React is clearly visible, especially on large unbuffered grids:

    http://cx.codaxy.com/v/inferno/docs/examples/grid/dynamic-gr...

    http://cx.codaxy.com/v/master/docs/examples/grid/dynamic-gro...

    I think that inferno-compat parity with React should be Inferno's top priority now. The performance is already great.

  • by joobus on 12/2/16, 6:02 PM

    Inferno seems to be very comparable to Riot.js, only Riot is more mature, has event delegation and a router, and is only 9.5k vs Inferno's 7k. And riot has an actual web page.

    http://riotjs.com/

  • by wheelerwj on 12/3/16, 6:17 AM

    no one is going to comment on how a library for powerful UI's has an under construction landing page that only links to github?

  • by wje on 12/2/16, 5:23 PM

    Unfortunately unrelated to Inferno the operating system, which was warped into running in a browser, many moons ago.

    http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

  • by iamleppert on 12/2/16, 6:32 PM

    It's disingenuous for the authors to claim this is a near "drop-in" replacement for React. Just because it works now for (likely) some limited surface area test app doesn't mean it will work in all of React's weird nooks and cranes, or its constantly changing APIs or huge stack of dependent behaviors it has inherited from its ever-changing dependencies.

    Clearly, the authors don't have much experience in this regard to make such claims. Caveat emptor.

  • by coldcode on 12/2/16, 4:46 PM

    Man I can't keep up with all of these. Is there a list that anyone is keeping track of for javascript UI frameworks? I suppose it would require daily updating.

  • by findjashua on 12/2/16, 6:59 PM

    if you don't have the site ready, it'd make more sense to just link to the repo

  • by JustSomeNobody on 12/2/16, 5:37 PM

    Where is this being used?

  • by SamBam on 12/2/16, 4:59 PM

    What's it like to re-write a React application into Inferno?

  • by spankalee on 12/2/16, 8:55 PM

    There are many reasons why Web Components are important and framework proliferation is just one of them.

  • by HugoDaniel on 12/11/16, 5:52 PM

    Is there any place where the community usually hangs ? Some chat room or forum ? Thanks

  • by kimshibal on 12/2/16, 4:33 PM

    Now, it's all about Svelte vs Inferno. I like Svelte more than Inferno.

  • by nkkollaw on 12/2/16, 11:28 PM

    Sorry, can someone do a ELI5?

    What does it mean to be React-like? Is it a drop-in replacement? Are React components compatible? Or it just looks like React (it does)?

    I'm going absolutely crazy trying to keep up-to-date with all frameworks coming out nowadays.

    Yesterday it was Svelte, today it's Inferno.

    What's good about using this instead of React? 3k of parsing instead of 40k is a huge improvement, but can we still using stuff that was made for React?

    I'm lost.

  • by iLoch on 12/2/16, 4:50 PM

    Cool, so it's React but presumably they've stripped out many of the things that make React enjoyable to use in order to satisfy some arbitrary file size metric. Why isn't this library 1kb, like LatestHotFramework.js?