Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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If you want to compare Solid to Vue, I think it is easier to just compare React to Vue. If you like React better, then you can compare React to Solid and see which you prefer. SolidJs is 90% similar to React in terms of DX, with only a coupler major differences.

Things the same as React in Solid: function-based components with hooks, JSX, overall "JS-first" (vs Vue which I'd describe as "HTML first")

Things different from React in Solid: "signals" instead of state (observer pattern), built-in components for rendering control flow (<Show />, <For />, etc), direct manipulation of the DOM. All these differences combine to the overall main difference, which is that React kinda revolves around an immutable re-render cycle where a function is re-run in its entirety to create a new vDOM representation each time, while Solid renders a component once then only selectively re-reruns parts of the component / mutates the DOM.

So I'd say pretty much the only similarity between Vue and Solid (contrasted with React) is the built-in components for control flow. Everything else is the same differences or similarities that Vue has with React.

I disagree, both Vue and SolidJS share the same underlying signal mechanism. Vue hides it a bit more, and has different default primitives, but they're both doing essentially the same thing under the hood. In both, you can think of a component as an entity that exists continuously for as long as it is mounted, and connects sources (i.e. signals) to outputs (i.e. HTML values).

React, on the other hand, is very much focused around the `UI = f(state)` paradigm, where the `f` (i.e. the component/render function) gets called afresh every time the state changes. You can avoid that somewhat via memoisation etc, but this is conceptually an optimisation rather than how the framework works.

The JSX vs SFC aspect is still significant, and SolidJS definitely tries to use some of the affordances that React developed initially. But the core idea in the framework is much closer to Vue than to React.

One interesting benefit React's tree + diffing system is that you can use a custom reconciler to do more than just create and update DOM nodes.

And a good example of that are React libraries that turn stateful imperative APIs into declarative nodes:

- https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/introduction

- https://github.com/pixijs/pixi-react

It isn't necessary. Solid has a similar custom renderer, with Pixi, three.js, terminal, etc... integrations. Solid is actually used a lot in embedded applications since it is low memory and performant. It powers Comcast's TV application applications like Peacock.

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