After much thought and conversations, Matt Mulluweng announced yesterday that the WordPress team will be dropping React from the Gutenberg project, the new WordPress editor destined to ship as part of WordPress in version 5.0, thus ending the hope of bundling React with WordPress. This is a result of licensing concerns that Matt and the rest of the team have, mainly around the patents clause that React carries. In his blog post, Matt expresses how much he was pushing for React to be part of WordPress.org. Moving forward however, React will no longer be part of the future of WordPress.org, and the team will continue to work on Gutenberg, with a different library.
The question now is, which library is the team going to choose? Some of the libraries being considered are Preact and Vue.js, with the later seemingly having a wider fan-base.
Preact might make the more reasonable choice from a technical standpoint, considering that the Gutenberg team has come so far along in the development of the new Gutenberg editor, it would be a much simpler transition, knowing how compatible preact and react are. Switching a project from React to Preact is a far simpler undertaking than rebuilding with vue.js – There’s a fair amount of documentation and tools, such as preact-compat that will help the team migrate to Preact with little impact on timelines.
Vue.js however seems to be the more popular choice between WordPress developers. Vue seems to provide a simpler approach to new learners and it’s gaining a fair amount of popularity as of late.