Imba - create complex web apps with ease! | Hacker News Reader

Imba - create complex web apps with ease!

imba.io

26 pointssindreaa8 comments

This is the new website for Imba. I'd love to get advice and constructive feedback regarding both the site itself, and the learning material.

The benchmarks seem fishy to me. The last time I looked, Mithril was much faster than React. This seemed to be one of its main selling points, besides being a much smaller lib.

What happened? Did Facebooks money buyed so much speed improvements or did Mithril just get slower?

Nevertheless a impressive performance for Imba. As a LiveScript fan I also like the syntax very much :)

The benchmark where mithril was much faster is very flawed, see comments from creators of vue: http://vuejs.org/perf/. Mithril was faster because it rendered asynchronously once every frame, while React rendered on every single simulated event. We will write a blogpost describing why Imba is in fact so much faster. I stand by the benchmark, and would love to explain it in detail. You can see some more discussion about it here: https://github.com/somebee/imba/issues/9

Thanks for the links, didn't know about these issues.

Because of the syntax alone I want to play around with Imba, haha.

How does it interopt with JavaScript?

It compiles to standard js, and it's entirely unproblematic to interoperate with any/all js libraries. I myself use Imba whenever I need to write something for web/node, even if it is only a small library to be used in a larger javascript project, but obviously I'm quite biased. If you're thinking about specific libraries / cases I'm happy to write up an example.

Ah, so it is more like LiveScript than Elm?

At the moment, the libs I'm using the most are Axios, Redux and Moment, Leaflet and D3.

Does an Imba app even need something like Redux (or Flux?) or does it have an own state-mechanism?

Yes, more like LiveScript / CoffeeScript. I don't think apps written in Imba really need anything like Redux/Flux, nor any other framework for that matter, since the way you define tags etc structures your code pretty well. We still don't have an official recommended way to do routing, as we're still experimenting with different approaches in real apps to see what sticks. You can check out the full source for the website at https://github.com/somebee/imba.io. It is not documented at all yet, but at least it gives some impression.

How do imba convert any XML files to JS object that we can manipulate to just about everything?

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