Vue author Evan You here. I'd like to respond to @lauriii 's comment here regarding his points.
First of all, I totally respect whatever decision the Drupal team makes, because this is their decision to make; I personally do not use Drupal, and do not have a strong interest in pushing Vue to become its framework of choice. That said, I think it would be beneficial to provide some perspective on the issues raised against Vue, to help the team make a better informed decision.
Learning Curve
I don't believe learning curve is subjective. When a developer tries to learn a new framework, how fast he/she becomes productive is something that can be objectively measured. The real issue is the lack of accurate measurements or statistics to properly support the arguments. My opinion is that ruling out learning curve as a selection criteria due to "subjective-ness" is wrong, and the broader Drupal community should be surveyed to take this into account.
Build Tools
What people often miss when they say "So can React" is the fact that you either use raw render function code with `React.CreateElement` (which I don't believe many enjoy), or you have to include an on-the-fly babel transipilation setup which makes it prohibitively expensive to ship to production, both code-size and perf wise. In comparison, you can safely ship a sans-build-tools Vue app to production by switching to the minified production build. "You can use it without a build tool" and "You can use it without a build tool in production without significant overhead" are very different claims.
Sustainability
The GitHub contributor graph is misleading in several ways:
- - The large amount of commits in Vue core before September 2016 are mostly from me alone because that was the initial development phase of the 2.0 rewrite.
- - After the 2.0 release, to maintain a clean commit log, all core contributors commit code via PRs and we merge them using GitHub's "Squash and Merge" feature. This results in only 1 commit for each PR most of the time. Which means a core contributor who has landed 30 PRs may only have 30 commits in the graph.
- - Vue.js core is still primarily maintained by me, but if you look at the amount of PRs we merge in recent months you'd see it's definitely not "by a single contributor".
As a project, Vue.js has come a long way to reach what it is today. It has grown from a small experiment into a mature framework that is used by hundreds of thousands of developers all over the world. It has also grown from “yet another side project” into an ecosystem with over 300 contributors across the vuejs organization, and maintained by a core team of over 20 active members across the globe. Core team members have taken up responsibilities such as core library maintenance, documentation, community engagement, and major new features such as type declaration improvements and test utilities. Saying that Vue is a “one man project” is no longer accurate and would be disrespectful to all the amazing contributions from the team and the community.
Stability
The only breaking change we had in the entire past 2 years was the 2.0 release. I'm not sure if that's a good enough track record for you, but we take stability very seriously as well, because there are close to 300k developers using Vue in production around the world. We have no intention in introducing breaking changes without a good reason, and we don't have plan for breaking changes in the foreseeable future. (we have discussions of a version that drops legacy browser support, but it won't have breaking API changes and it will released alongside the current version.)
Ecosystem
There's no doubt React has a larger ecosystem, but I believe the size of the ecosystem has a threshold of diminishing marginal returns, and the difference between the two wouldn't make material difference especially in the long run. With Vue's current ecosystem size it's also very unlikely that you'd run into a problem that doesn't have a corresponding solution.
Talent pool is a metrics with a big delaying factor because the broader industry is generally slow in adoption and are often trend followers. Vue had close to no job listings at all a year ago but we are seeing rapid growth now. In terms of familiarity, if the current team is already heavily invested in React, then indeed it might be a strong reason to just go with React.
Overall, I feel that the situation with Drupal is very much similar to that of Wordrpess: the team already has investment in React, and the decision is made primarily considering core development. The question of how much the choice will affect community usage (e.g. plugin/extension development) is not clear to me from the information disclosed so far - but personally I think that should be more thoroughly discussed. If all community developers would have to use the framework chosen to develop extensions, I believe Vue would be a much more approachable choice and would benefit the community; but if that's not the case, then I have no objections with Drupal going with React.