Why Idealyst over Vue, Angular, Svelte?Vue, Angular, and Svelte are excellent at what they were built for: building web apps. The honest answer up front is that any head-to-head with idealyst isn't quite a fair comparison, because they weren't designed to ship to mobile or desktop without an Electron- or Capacitor-style wrapper.
What you'd actually be choosingIf you only ship to the browser, a mature JS framework is probably the right answer today. The ecosystem is enormous, every hire already knows it, the bundle is small, and the tooling is battle-tested. Idealyst's win here is not "better web framework" — it's "same codebase also runs natively on iOS, Android, macOS, and a GPU surface." If that second half is part of your roadmap, the trade-off shifts.
Performance on the webWeb-to-web, Idealyst's fine-grained reactive system lands in the same neighborhood as the fastest JS frameworks and ahead of the slower ones on tight reactive workloads. Signals mutate exactly the DOM nodes that depend on them — no virtual-DOM diff, no top-down component-tree pass to invalidate.
The bundle-size trade-off (honestly)The place where pure-JS frameworks are clearly ahead today is bundle size. A Vue / Svelte / Angular app can ship a few tens of KB of framework code; an Idealyst web build ships a WASM binary that's typically several hundred KB compressed, even with aggressive code splitting and SSR. This is a real cost and we're not going to dress it up — it shows up on cold loads, on data-plan-constrained networks, and on first paint.The framework already does what it can on this front: wasm-split for code-splitting, SSR for first paint, runtime font fetching instead of embedding, lazy chunks for heavy subtrees. We're actively working on shrinking it further, but it's worth being upfront — if a couple hundred KB of WASM on cold load is a deal-breaker, picking a JS framework today is the right call.If you've thought about WASM bundle-size optimization and have ideas, we'd genuinely love to talk about them or take a PR. The discussions on GitHub are open:https://github.com/IdealystIO/idealyst-native/discussions