Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

>> rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks

I love this. How many times in my career have I heard "the rewrite will take us <some short period of time>". Good luck with that estimate.

View on HN

Gutenberg's direct React usage is actually quite small - components implement a WordPress element, which is currently a wrapper for React, but can be transformed to use something else behind the scenes.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/tree/master/element

Also, Gutenberg is still quite a young library (about 8 months old), and just hit 1.0 in the last few weeks, so it's not too late to rewrite.

We've migrated reasonably large React projects to Preact using the amazing preact-compat : https://www.npmjs.com/package/preact-compat -- it was really as simple as wiring aliases in the webpack config!

Isn't it unclear if preact violates Facebook's patents?

The current understanding is that none of the patents in the portfolio currently covers React (and by extension, preact). But flipping the switch would satisfy the first-order requirement of not imposing the FB patent grant upon users of WP

I guess you weren't dependent on Synthetic events then.

This is plausible because there are quite a few libraries that have adopted React's model and some have even adopted React's API (Preact).

Of course, they could still get sued for patent infringement if Facebook has patents covering certain aspects of React (which, ironically, they wouldn't be under the React license).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com