Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious, what did they have to throw overboard to lighten the load from 45kB to 3kB? They list a handful of missing bits[1] -- I'm not a React developer so I don't know how significant they are, but they don't sound like the sort of things that'd multiply the size of the codebase by fifteen... So what's the deal? How so small?

[1] (https://github.com/developit/preact/wiki/Differences-to-Reac...)

View on HN

Some key points:

1. Preact eliminated white/black lists and uses regexes instead [1]. These lists take up huge amounts of space in React/ReactDOM [2].

2. No synthetic events, just native `addEventListener` [3].

3. Only target the DOM for rendering, no React Native to worry about.

4. Less invariants, error handling, and error messages

[1] https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/constant...

[2] https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/src/renderers/...

[3] https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/dom/inde...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com