Some nice React alternatives, all of which work conceptually similar to React, in no specific order at all:
- Mithril
- CitoJS
- Mercury (built on top of virtual-dom)
- Gem.js
- Inferno.js
- Riot.js
- Deku
- virtual-dom (just the V in MVC, build the M and C yourself)
- Cycle.js (expands on top of virtual-dom)
- incremental-dom (like virtual-dom, but by Google)
- Likely.js
Note: a couple of these (Mercury and Deku) have options for using JSX to compile JSX-syntax into to the functional form that the library uses, so be careful there. I’m not sure how the React patent license applies to JSX.
So far, of all the options, Riot.js is the only alternative that uses DocumentFragments (read this to see how using DocFrags makes things fast), which make me believe Riot.js may have thought deeper about performance: creating a DOM tree in the live document can cause extra things like rendering to happen. Manipulating DOM in a DocumentFragment prevents extra things like that from happening until the DocumentFragment is attached to the live DOM. I haven’t done any actual performance testing though.
In various places around the web, Mercury shows the fastest performance. It’d be nice to add some of the other alternatives to those tests.