I made the jump from React to Preact just recently for this website. It was interesting.
Why did I do it?
My mission for this website is to always chase after speed. Make the website extremely fast without sacrificing anything.
Fast 3kB alternative to React with the same modern API
- React-DOM is a 42kB bundle minified + gzipped.
- React is 2.5 kB bundled minified + gzipped.
In total, that would be 44.5 kb, while Preact alone is just 4kB minified and gzipped. That’s a 10x reduction!
Note that I did not add preact-compat, because for my use case in the website, I don’t need it.
There’s also performance claims that preact’s faster, but for what I have here, it is probably negligible.
So that’s why I did it. I just wanted this website to be fast. I wanted to show what I am capable of doing when it comes to reaching out for speed.
Losses
- React DevTools doesn’t work. However, Preact DevTools does work.
- I cannot just simply import React libraries. I need to evaluate whether I need preact-compat.
Issues I encountered and how I fixed them
React.Children
props.children is always an array in Preact. However, I used toChildArray to also guarantee it.
@testing-library/react
I have to use @testing-library/preact instead.
Hooks
Hooks comes from preact/hooks instead of react.
Renderer
Since I use TypeScript and Vite, this was easy:
In tsconfig.json, I added the following:
{
"jsx": "react-jsx",
"jsxImportSource": "preact"
}In Astro, I switched to @astrojs/preact instead of @astrojs/react.
In vitest, I used @preact/preset-vite instead of @vitejs/plugin-react.
TypeScript
Now this is the stuff that requires a Google or search in Stack Overflow.
I cannot just simply use @types/react. It doesn’t work that way. I have to use the preact types. It’s probably because I don’t have preact-compat.
React.ReactNodeisComponentChildrenReact.HTMLPropsandReact.SVGPropsisJSX.HTMLAttributesandJSX.SVGAttributesReact.ReactElementisJSX.Element
Everything else was similar. I either imported from preact or preact/hooks.
Moving forward
I am always striving to make this website the fastest possible to demonstrate what I can do as a Software Engineer. I want to see how I can surpass my limits to deliver the best and awesome web applications. I’m not attached to any JS framework out there. I want to learn how to give the best for our users.
To see these changes in action, here were the relevant commits:
- https://github.com/hrgui/hrgui.github.io/commit/9bcbc051169f783ee409a2db129d02a0466503d7 - the initial preact conversion
- https://github.com/hrgui/hrgui.github.io/commit/ddd2d1b0b8fdc7402ac8c35eba081cb8c687dd5d - fix that I needed to make Vite happy with chart.js (it doesn’t support ESM yet)
- https://github.com/hrgui/hrgui.github.io/commit/fcfbc87a54025b6f616e6fa3d37d1cf226a4774a - for TypeScript
Addendum
Fitting a square peg in a round hole.
Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t mean that if I converted my website to Preact that I’ll move everything to React. I’ll only do it if it makes sense. I work on my website by myself, and the website is very minimal in footprint. It also gives me good practice to become a better Frontend Engineer than relying on React libraries like material-ui or react-bootstrap for my site. So that is why I moved my entire website to Preact. I am always trying to improve my craft, or what we call, surpass my limits (anime reference).
Moving actual, real-life applications with large teams with Preact requires a lot of research and buy-in from the team. If the team isn’t for it, I would not do it. It just carries more tech debt. Later on, they might re-convert it back to React.