Pretty good comparison overall, but a few points I’d like to discuss:
“Templates are prone to unnoticed runtime errors, are hard to test, and are not easy to restructure or decompose.”
These arguments against templates are too broad. Templates are by definition statically analyzable (even more so than dynamic render functions) and Vue provides many compile-time AND runtime warnings for common template syntax errors, and can be further improved in the future. Also, since Vue templates compile into render functions under the hood, a template containing expression syntax errors will be detected at compile time instead of runtime (if you are using a build setup instead of in-browser compilation).
“In contrast, Javascript-made templates can be organised into components with nicely decomposed and DRY code that is more reusable and testable.”
Organizing your application as decoupled components has little to do with whether you are using templates or JSX, but more with how components are defined as a function of state and prop. In this sense, Vue components and React components are equivalent on the higher level and there’s nothing that makes a React component fundamentally more testable than a Vue component. You can do exactly the same thing with a Vue component: render the virtual DOM with different set of props and assert the output. Admittedly this is may not be very obvious for new users, but we are planning to provide official component testing utilities in the near future.
“Meanwhile, React’s immutable application data may not be as succinct, but it shines in larger application when transparency and testability become critical.”
This statement lacks the proper context of state management patterns used. In most cases, the built-in state management patterns provided by the frameworks themselves are insufficient for large scale apps, and a dedicated solution like Redux or Vuex must be used. It is very premature to declare that “If you plan to build a large scale app, go with React” without giving a proper discussion about the solutions designed to deal with large scale apps for both frameworks.
Alibaba’s Weex is another cross-platform UI project. Currently it considers Vue an “inspiration” and uses a lot of the same syntax, with plans to fully integrate Vue. However, the timeline and specifics of this integration are still unclear.
The roadmap is publicly available. In the latest Weex release (0.9.4), Vue 2 is now already officially integrated as a runtime framework which allows the use of the majority of features found in Vue’s API (excluding those that are web-platform-specific). (examples)
“Since Vue has HTML templates as a core part of its design and does not have custom rendering as a current feature, it’s hard to see that a native counterpart for Vue.js in its current form will be as tight as what React.js and React Native are.”
This is factually wrong. Vue 2.x is designed to support custom rendering targets from the very beginning, it’s just not exposed via public APIs. Again, templates are compiled into Virtual DOM render functions which allows any type of lower-level customizations needed to adapt to native rendering targets.
