Preact: Preact bundle larger than React

[noise-machines]

Hi folks!

Thanks for all your amazing hard work on Preact 🙏A couple of very high performance products I've launched would have been impossible without all the effort you've put in to building such a small, fast library. I know that making things small is often harder than making them big. (As Blaise Pascal once said, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.")

I just came across a data point and wanted to see what you all thought: In the past, one of Preact's many benefits was how much smaller it was than React. According to Bundlephobia, that's no longer the case:

| | Minified | Minified + gzipped |
|-----------|--------|--------|
| React 16.7 | 5.9 kB | 2.5 kB |
| Preact 8.4 | 8.9 kB | 3.5 kB |

Not sure what the implications are (if any), but wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Cheers!
Thomas

[Panya]

It's size without react-dom (in React case). Basically Preact is alternative to react + react-dom. So in React case you should sum their sizes (~33.5 KB vs 3.5 KB)

[marvinhagemeister]

What @Panya said👍

The react package doesn't really do anything in its own and must be used with either react-dom, react-native or some other bindings together.

So yeah, 3.5kB is a lot smaller than 33.5kB 😉

[noise-machines]

Figured I was missing something. Thanks for pointing that out!