Comment by leptons

I use Preact for a very lean build for a front-end that lives in a small embedded MCU flash ROM. Gziped the whole front-end is about 25KB, including SVG images baked-in to the preact gzip file. I'm very careful about the libraries I include and their impact on the overall payload size.

I had started with a simple front-end that was using jQuery to quickly prototype the device controls, but quickly exceeded my goal of keeping the front-end at under 40KB total gzipped. The problem is needing more than just jQuery, we also needed jQueryUI to help with the front-end, or build out similar complex components ourselves. And as soon as the jQuery code became non-trivial, it was clear that Preact made much more sense to use. Our payload is quite a bit smaller yhan the jQuery prototype was.