Inferno: An Extremely Fast, React-like JavaScript UI Library

Introduction

Inferno is an extremely fast, React-like JavaScript library designed for building modern user interfaces. Its primary objective is to deliver the fastest possible runtime performance for web applications, making it exceptionally well-suited for rendering real-time data views or large DOM trees. Inferno achieves this speed through multiple sophisticated optimizations, including its own JSX compilers that create monomorphic createVNode calls and a diffing process that utilizes bitwise flags to memoize object shapes. It offers a component-driven architecture with a one-way data flow, a partial synthetic event system, and a robust API that will feel familiar to developers experienced with React.

Installation

Getting started with Inferno is straightforward. You can begin with Create Inferno App for a quick setup or install the core package via npm:

npm install --save inferno

For server-side rendering, routing, or compatibility with existing React applications, you can install additional packages:

# Server-side rendering
npm install --save inferno-server

# Routing
npm install --save inferno-router

# JSX compilation (e.g., Babel plugin)
npm install --save-dev babel-plugin-inferno

# Compatibility with React apps
npm install --save-dev inferno-compat

Pre-bundled files for browser consumption are also available via CDN.

Examples

Inferno maintains a design philosophy similar to React, focusing on component-based development and one-way data flow. Here's a basic example demonstrating how to render a component using JSX:

import { render } from 'inferno';

const message = "Hello world";

function MyComponent(props) {
  return <h1>{props.message}</h1>;
}

render(
  <MyComponent message={ message } />,
  document.getElementById("app")
);

This example showcases the simplicity of defining and rendering components, with JSX providing a clear way to express Inferno's virtual DOM.

Why Use Inferno?

Inferno stands out as a high-performance UI library due to several key advantages:

• Exceptional Performance: It is engineered for speed, outperforming many other libraries in rendering, updating, and removing elements from the DOM, especially in complex scenarios.
• React-like API: Developers familiar with React will find Inferno's API, concepts, and component lifecycle events easy to adopt, reducing the learning curve.
• Advanced Optimizations: Inferno employs unique techniques like highly optimized JSX compilers, bitwise flags for efficient diffing, and the linkEvent feature to remove the need for arrow functions or binding event callbacks, further boosting performance.
• Rich Feature Set: It supports isomorphic rendering, controlled components for form elements, portals, fragments, and provides lifecycle events even on functional components, offering greater flexibility.
• Small Footprint: Despite its powerful features and performance, Inferno maintains a relatively small bundle size, contributing to faster load times for web applications.
• Partial Synthetic Event System: Unlike React's fully synthetic system, Inferno's partial approach offers better performance through intelligent event delegation.

Links

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/infernojs/inferno
• Official Website: https://infernojs.org/
• Discord Community: https://discord.gg/SUKuhgaBpF
• Benchmarks: https://infernojs.github.io/inferno