A big factor here is that Mithril describes templates programmatically rather than strings of data. It's the difference between: function render() { eval("(f

A big factor here is that Mithril describes templates programmatically rather than strings of data. It's the difference between: function render() { eval("(function () {}());"); } and function render() { (function () {}()); } These are going to run at much different speeds because one involves parsing multiple times while the other only needs to be parsed once. The tradeoff is some complexity (though there's also more flexibility too). <ul class="foo"> <li data-ng-repeat="item in items"> {{item.x}} </li> </ul> m("ul.foo", [ items.map(function (item) { m("li", item.x); }); ]);