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Comment by froggertoaster | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone use Preact? If I'm a team lead, why would I choose to use it over plain React? Would not my sense of risk be triggered at least a little?

I've talked to many React engineers and none of them have a good reason to use a library like Preact.

Once again, the author is content to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily and publish it as something that can/should be used in production. It's a useful toy, a nice exercise in "what can be done" but not much else. Yes, I'm aware of the countless "useless" things that get posted to HN all the time - none of them purport themselves to being anything more than what they are.

I have never met anyone with any sense using Preact, and I see no compelling reason to use Signals either when there are countless other libraries doing similar things, with developers that actually use them.

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Is shipping less JS important for your use case? If so Preact can be 10x smaller than React. If only you could do that with all of your dependencies that'd be outstanding. According js-frameworks-benchmark it's also faster at runtime (https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...).

If startup and runtime performance have 0 value there's no reason to use Preact. If startup and runtime performance have greater than 0 value there's some reason to consider using Preact.

FWIW, one specific counter-example would be Etsy choosing to adopt Preact to migrate upwards from React 15:

- https://github.com/mq2thez/blog/blob/main/upgrade-react-etsy...

- https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/mobius-adopting-jsx-while-p...

My top use case for preact was when I needed to embed code into customer’s sites and wanted it to be as lightweight as possible since it was one of my selling points. Think embedded systems but in a web context (like injecting a web form in the middle of an existing page or a modal, completely independent of the rest of the page)

Another example, you know those UIs that might drop down when you click on a chrome extension icon? No need to use react for a simple extension drop down.

If you’re building a 1st party platform or webapp then react makes more sense. But there’s clearly usecases for React-lite.

Regardless, preact core is boring and stable (like 5 years old). I built a multi-million dollar company on it previously for what it’s worth.

> I built a multi-million dollar company on it previously for what it’s worth.

Not a particularly useful anecdote, unless you're telling me your choice of Preact was some kind of linchpin. And I'd bet it was most certainly not.

> unless you're telling me your choice of Preact was some kind of linchpin

Oh it definitely wasn’t. The other reasons are valid though.

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