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Discussion on: React Beginner Question Thread ⚛

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Welcome Dan, definitely a lot of React folks happy to have you around.

We run a thread like this on Reddit but to be honest I'm finding Reddit hard to use and very impersonal so I don't hang out there much.

This definitely jives with the reason we're here in the first place.

Note this is an experiment.

This is great. We'll be following this post for cues on how to build on this sort of post and any feedback from you or anyone is really appreciated.

Now for a question: What are your thoughts on Preact, how does the React team/community interact with spinoff projects like this?

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Dan Abramov • Edited

What are your thoughts on Preact, how does the React team/community interact with spinoff projects like this?

I think it’s cool that people want to stay within the React paradigm even if their tradeoffs don’t match ours.

At Facebook, we typically use React for applications that are truly dynamic and need to scale well with the application size. We don’t use it for stuff like landing pages or extremely thin apps. So in our case the difference between 3 and 30 kB gzipped is less pronounced because the vast majority of the code comes from the application itself.

For our use cases, supporting older browsers consistently and having great runtime performance is more important. We're also still working on React, and as we enrich its capabilities we're hoping to bring down the repetitive code in the product (e.g. for data fetching). We think will be more impactful because, unlike the library, the product code keeps growing over time.

We don't really interact with these projects as much, but we hope they continue to be useful to the folks who rely on them, and will happily welcome these users back if they decide React better answers their tradeoffs later. 🙂