4 ms·

I used Mithril for a prototype app a couple years ago, and it was one of those projects that is awesome to get into: the documentation is short but complete, an

by gregmac 10y ago

I used Mithril for a prototype app a couple years ago, and it was one of those projects that is awesome to get into: the documentation is short but complete, and you can basically learn it and produce a usable app in an afternoon. One of the things I really liked is there's really no sense of 'magic': as I was learning it, it just clicked and I could basically picture how the framework had been implemented. So many times when I'm learning another framework/library it gets to the point where I just think "Whatever, I don't understand why I have to do this particular boilerplate and though it seems dumb to me, I'll just do it because that's the way it works". Ultimately we ended up building with Vue (team decision, and I don't remember the precise reasons now) which is similar in many ways, but I did really enjoy Mithril. With 1.0 out I'm going to have to find an excuse to give it a shot again. ---- The changelog [1] is a great example of why the Mithril docs are so great. Each entry shows a code example of old and new usage. [1] http://mithril.js.org/change-log.html http://mithril.js.org/change-log.html

patricius 10y ago
I've enjoyed Mithril for a while now, and you will be pleasantly surprised with the rewrite (i.e., the 1.0 version). It's different in quite a few ways and does away with the confusing controller concept for one thing. But best of all might be lhorie's wisdom (and of course the contributors) that you can consume from the documentation.
aidenn0 10y ago
Clear documentation and lack of magic are what I love about it too. I originally learned Mithril by porting an existing react app, and the newer version was so much easier to debug that I ended up keeping it. The amount of indirection in React makes subtle bugs very hard to localize.
epidemian 10y ago
> One of the things I really liked is there's really no sense of 'magic' Absolutely! And besides making it feel much less 'magic', Mithril's simplicity also reflects on the tooling, bundle sizes, and general code complexity needed to get things going. I did a small-to-medium-sized project using Mithril last year, and felt like the learning curve was super smooth; no hard bumps at all. The development progress felt quite steady during the project, and the bundle sizes and speed of the app were always fine; it felt very snappy. Recently i worked on a different project with a React+Redux (+react-router, +Glamor, +Babel, +Webpack, +whatnot) stack, and i don't know if it was the project itself that required so much more complexity, or that we made the wrong decisions regarding architecture, but everything felt bloated. Bundle sizes nearing the 1MB mark; "build" times of dozens of seconds on beefy development machines; and a level of boilerplate code that reminded me of my Java EE days (but with none of the type safety... besides React's verbose PropTypes). I can't say i feel too hot about the current trends of front-end development :/ I hope that simpler libraries like Mithril get more traction :)
tomcam 10y ago
That changelog is mind-bogglingly good

by gregmac 10y ago

patricius 10y ago

I've enjoyed Mithril for a while now, and you will be pleasantly surprised with the rewrite (i.e., the 1.0 version). It's different in quite a few ways and does away with the confusing controller concept for one thing. But best of all might be lhorie's wisdom (and of course the contributors) that you can consume from the documentation.

aidenn0 10y ago

Clear documentation and lack of magic are what I love about it too. I originally learned Mithril by porting an existing react app, and the newer version was so much easier to debug that I ended up keeping it. The amount of indirection in React makes subtle bugs very hard to localize.

epidemian 10y ago

> One of the things I really liked is there's really no sense of 'magic' Absolutely! And besides making it feel much less 'magic', Mithril's simplicity also reflects on the tooling, bundle sizes, and general code complexity needed to get things going. I did a small-to-medium-sized project using Mithril last year, and felt like the learning curve was super smooth; no hard bumps at all. The development progress felt quite steady during the project, and the bundle sizes and speed of the app were always fine; it felt very snappy. Recently i worked on a different project with a React+Redux (+react-router, +Glamor, +Babel, +Webpack, +whatnot) stack, and i don't know if it was the project itself that required so much more complexity, or that we made the wrong decisions regarding architecture, but everything felt bloated. Bundle sizes nearing the 1MB mark; "build" times of dozens of seconds on beefy development machines; and a level of boilerplate code that reminded me of my Java EE days (but with none of the type safety... besides React's verbose PropTypes). I can't say i feel too hot about the current trends of front-end development :/ I hope that simpler libraries like Mithril get more traction :)

tomcam 10y ago

That changelog is mind-bogglingly good