Mithril vs Aurelia

Most other frameworks either offer a huge API to deal with model and view synchronization, or defer to other libraries & plugins to cater for relatively simple use cases. Mithril's API is tiny but complete. The natural reaction is to assume something is missing, but as you build you realise you incredibly fast, powerful and rich applications can be built using nothing but Mithril.

Mithril's loading times are very fast. This is because it's templates are compiled first and then served to the browser and because it uses a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM is a virtual tree containing all the nodes of the real DOM, every time anything changes in the virtual DOM, Mithril does not re-render the entire (real) DOM, instead it just searches and applies the differences.

Most MVC frameworks use HTML templates to render their views. They are good and useful because they are easy to read and understand. But they add more complication to an app because it's practically a new language and syntax that needs to be learned.

Mithril argues that separating markup from logic is just a separation of technologies and not concerns, so you can write Mithril views in JavaScript. Writing them in JavaScript also makes it easier to debug them (HTML templates can't be debugged).

Doesn't lock you into any complicated conventions or structures, only one function is required to create either a Controller or a View. You're free to implement your architecture exactly as you want, so you can focus on the purpose of MVC, making connections between computer data and stuff in the end user's head.

Weights just 8Kb gzipped and has no dependencies. A reactive stream module can be added for one extra Kb.

Mithril has a large and expansive documentation despite it's relatively small API. Mithril's GitHub repo has more documentation than actual source code. None of that documentation is auto-generated

One thing you need to start using Mithril is just a DOM node. With Mithril a developer is able to introduce the library step by step.

Mithril gives to the developer the flexibility to chose the best JavaScript library to use for a specific task.
A huge framework like Angular instead forces you to use their API, which does not necessarily evolve as fast as the JavaScript ecosystem. Therefore you may end up in case when you are stuck using an API which is just not the best in terms of performance

It's plain old JavaScript, can be used without webpack, gulp or grunt, just include it into your HTML and start writing your app.

Mithril's API is pretty small compared to other frameworks. It forces developers to solve problems in JavaScript rather than in Mithril. Other frameworks with massive APIs force you to think in a way that suits the framework. Mithril doesn't do that.

Full support for Typescript built in

Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax.

Examples:

Default binding => value.bind

One Way binding => value.one-way

Two Way binding => value.two-way

One Time binding => value.one-time

Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written.

Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5.

Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired.

Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development.

Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. It's one of the closest libraries that you'll find to basically write plain-old, vanilla Javascript or TypeScript code (classes) and doesn't polluate your HTML/SCSS. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML.

Learning aurelia basically means learning EcmaScript and HTML, since aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code.

The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded.

Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately.

One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand.

Aurelia is officially backed by Durandal Inc. and has commercial and enterprise support is available.

Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate.

Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element:
https://github.com/Vheissu/aurelia-react-example/blob/master/README.md

It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards:
http://aurelia.io/hub.html#/doc/article/aurelia/framework/latest/integrating-with-polymer

https://github.com/aurelia/cli
The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon.

The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse.

With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it.

This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services.

It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start.