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pygy_·

This is where small frameworks like Mithril shine.

The site says 12KB, for some reason, but minimized and gizipped, the latest version is closer to 7 or 8 KB IIRC.

http://mithril.js.org/

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Just came back to mention that two of the most well-known Mithril-based projects, Flarum.org[1] and Lichess.org[2] are open source and have mobile UIs that you can try out, so if anyone's interested in seeing non-trivial codebases that use a "lighter approach" alluded to in this article, there you go.

[1](https://github.com/flarum/flarum)

[2](https://github.com/veloce/lichobile)

http://flarum.org/ is especially relevant since it is a competitor to Atwood's Discourse which sparked the current discussion.

http://lichess.org/ is an [f|F]ree online chess platform.

Mithril is amazing. I've been using it for over a year and only like it more and more. Its fast initial load time is very relevant in today's world of mobile web apps.

I like riot.js; a react-like library weighing in ~3.5 kb min+gzip.

http://riotjs.com/

Browserify gives you modules. This technology can be used to structure the code & package only the bare essential functionality.

http://browserify.org/

Riot looks a whole lot like Polymer.

They compare it to polymer in the docs - much smaller, for one.

I don't say Mithril is bad but code size is no indicator for performance. Counterexample: The minified Box2D code is ~760kB large and impressively performant.

It is an indicator of load time. Most users bounce off pages that take longer than 3 secs to load.

Mithril isn't the fastest of the virtual DOM libraries out there, but it is usually good enough, even on mobile.

Usually latency due to dependent requests are your killer on mobile. Even Edge throughput wasn't that bad once it finally got going.

Fixed :)

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