Pros and Cons of Preact JS

Created by Jason Miller, Preact happens to be an innovative alternative to React. The main intention of creating Preact was to build a compact JavaScript framework despite providing identical features and API like that of React. A size of 3kb will make you free from worrying about your JavaScript framework or library, consuming a large portion of the total JavaScript size of your app.

Preact is quite fast, not merely due to its size. It happens to be amongst the fastest Virtual DOM libraries on the market at present, mainly due to a predictable and straightforward diff implementation.

Preact can support all the browsers even though some polyfills might be needed by it for IE7 and IE8. A large portion of the community has adopted Preact at present. Companies such as Housing.com, m.uber.com, and Lyft have been making use of Preact right now.

Preact Features

Virtually every modern browser, including Firefox, Chrome, Edge, IE11+, and Safari, is supported by Preact. Companies are quickly shifting to it mainly because of the many add-ons and plugins. Below, we have mentioned some of the most notable features of Preact.

• Lightweight – It is a considerable small size, which helps to make this framework extremely popular. The most significant part of the app is going to be your code. This implies that you will have plenty of time for coding without thinking of keeping the framework within your control.

• High performance – Proact happens to be amongst the fastest virtual DOM libraries out there. This has been possible mainly due to its compact size and also the predictable and straightforward diff implementation.

• Embeddable – It will be possible to embed Proact into a widget by applying some tools. You can create an app sans complicated integration.

• Productive instantly – Productivity is going to increase multiple times if there is no need to work on the size. Since it is lightweight, it will spare your efforts, and you will become productive immediately.

• Portability – It will be possible to take the virtual DOM component to other locations, which would not be feasible otherwise.

• Ecosystem compatible – It will be possible to use lots of components from the massive React ecosystem by simply aliasing React to Proact.

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The Pros:

1. Small size

As stated earlier, the main advantage of using Preact JS happens to be its small size of only 3kb. This helps make it amongst the most lightweight frameworks or libraries on the market that you will ever come across. Despite having a small size, a quicker render performance is delivered by Preact, unlike its elder brother React, having an altitude of approximately 40kb.

2. Highly efficient

As compared to React, Preact happens to be much more efficient when it comes to memory usage, which implies that less work has to be performed by the garbage collector.

3. Preact CLI

A robust command-line interface tool is offered by Preact, which will enable you to develop innovative projects quickly, and you need not require dealing with web pack or Babel.

4. Link State module

Despite being React’s subset, Preact comes with its advanced features. The LinkState module responsible for optimizing state modifications happens to be the most significant of them. React uses arrow functions within a render() process for updating state. This particular method is ineffective with lots of unnecessary code. Preact fixes this issue by using the LinkState module, which returns a handle function while passed in an event and is responsible for automatically updating component state modifications.

5. Compatibility

Preact, similar to React, uses the identical ES6 API. This implies that the developers can switch to Preact easily at the production time in an already existing project.

The Cons:

1. Small community as well as popularity

Unlike React, the Preact community is relatively small, and there are just 200 contributors on Github. Still, now, Preact is not that popular, and while half a million websites have been created using React, only 20,000 live websites have been created using Preact JS.

2. propTypes, a key feature of React, is not supported by Preact

One more notable downside with Preact is that createClass is not endorsed by it. Preact supports only ES6 calls-based components and stateless functional components.

Also Reads:

–Top 3 JavaScript Testing Frameworks with their Pros and Cons

–Top 5 JavaScript Development Framework in 2020