Introducing Inferno 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Inferno 1.0

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84 pointsmarksamman25 comments

Was I the only one who saw the title and thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)?

Absolutely. I was confused by the version number but otherwise happy to see something happening with Inferno. Then the disappointment...

Thankfully it wasn't about the movie – that certainly was a disappointment!

That was exactly what I thought. I was interested to hear about further Plan 9 developments.

There's a lot of traction for Inferno – the JavaScript UI library lately, so I was pretty sure this had nothing to do with the OS. It's a shame the operating system couldn't have a nice logo like the JavaScript library though!

Yes. It might help if they referred to it as Inferno-UI.

There was a good interview [1] with Dominic, the author, a month ago, where he covered much of the design rationale behind Inferno. And he's on HN [2], and his comments often offer valuable insight as well. In a strange twist, he also just joined Facebook to work on React [3], so some of his ingenuity will find its way into React in the future. Meanwhile, Inferno is now run by a team of core committers [4].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160757 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=trueadm [3] https://twitter.com/trueadm/status/813313438759919616 [4] https://github.com/orgs/infernojs/people

Dominic seems like a truly awesome guy. He also frequents /r/javascript. What I hope is that eventually Inferno can be entirely replaced with React and the teams merged. Right now though the two are similar enough to not stop someone from moving back and forth (especially when Inferno offers a React shim), but are different enough to warrant their own existences.

As a beginner to JS frameworks (and a medium proficiency), is it advisable to skip React and target to learn Inferno instead?

For learning purposes, I would advise sticking with React. Being more mature, you'll likely be able to find answers to your questions more easily. Pluralsight, for example, has lots of great courses on React but none on Inferno. Knowledge will be highly portable between the two so if you find a need to switch over to Inferno at some point you won't have any trouble.

No. But the good news is that Inferno is extremely API-compatible with React (deliberately so, and has an inferno-compat package to help further) so should it stick around and continue to be this much more performant than React, switching should be relatively easy.

Yes, because in a few months it will be topping the HN headlines on how everyone is porting their applications to it.

I think that seems unlikely, if only for the fact that React has a path for developing native apps. Writing shared business logic in Redux and allowing both DOM and RN seems like a slam dunk to me.

I was being sarcastic.

In any case RN isn't something I would ever use, given the choice for writing native applications.

Yep. It's an unfortunate that Inferno is not for native app. If it did, I would switch in a heart beat.

No, stick with React.

JS Frameworks become obsolete within a year (2 years at most) so you should learn what you like most. The community and documentation available should be a big plus.

React was first released in 2013 and I don't see it disappearing any time soon.

Released, but it didn't get popular until recently, definitely less than 2 years ago.

I personally think people will start switching to Polymer en masse when Google is done rebuilding YouTube with Polymer.

In the GP's defense, that's what we thought about Angular two years ago.

Angular is still around.

Which Angular? Is Angular 2 really the same framework?

I think you make a good point. I personally don't care much about Angular and I don't see myself ever using it. But it is still in heavy use, which was the only point I was attempting to make.

Great work! I'm so excited to use Inferno now it's finally out of beta and stable :)

excellent!

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