10 Years of Vue: the Past and the Future

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Vue.js Live 2024 highlighted Vue's journey over the past decade. With 9,326 commits and 493 versions released, Vue has grown to serve 2 million users worldwide. Vue.js introduced tracking-based reactivity and a balance between template syntax and manual render functions. The Vue 3 ecosystem, including Vite, continues to thrive with performance improvements and new features like Vapor mode. Vue remains independent, focusing on user interests. The latest release, Vue 3.4, brought performance boosts, and Vue 3.5 will enhance reactivity efficiency. The Vue community's support is vital for ongoing development and innovation.

From Author:

Vue was first publicly announced in 2014 and is 10 years old this year! In this talk, we will take a look back together at how it changed and evolved from its humble beginnings, discuss some of the challenges and learnings, and how we think about its future.

This talk has been presented at Vue.js Live 2024, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

Vue.js Live 2024 is an event where Evan Yew, the creator of Vue and Vite, shares a retrospective on the 10-year history of Vue.js, including its impact, evolution, and future directions.

As of Vue.js Live 2024, Vue has over 9,326 commits and has released over 493 versions.

Vue.js has over 2 million users worldwide, 250,000 GitHub stars, 4.9 million weekly npm downloads, and over 1 billion monthly CDN requests on jsdeliver.

Vue.js introduced deep tracking-based reactivity, single-file components with build tools, and a compiler-powered reactivity sugar called reactivity transform. It also supports both template and virtual DOM render functions.

Vue.js was first released in 2013, with its public announcement in February 2014.

Vue is unique in being a mainstream framework that remains independent, not dominantly owned by a single corporation. This ensures that the framework operates solely considering the interests of its users without influence from a single financial backer.

As of Vue.js Live 2024, Vue 3 usage has increased by 77.6% over the past year, constituting over 58.3% of total npm usage.

Vue 3.4 introduced a completely rewritten posture that is two times faster, a more efficient reactivity system, and significant server-side rendering performance improvements.

Planned features for Vue 3.5 include more reactivity efficiency improvements, stabilizing reactive props de-structure, and stabilizing suspense for server-side rendering.

Vapor mode is an advanced implementation for Vue.js that focuses on component implementation and interop between vapor and virtual DOM. It is led by Kevin and aims to enhance the development experience.

Evan You
Evan You
29 min
25 Apr, 2024

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  • Hodadis  Birhan
    Hodadis Birhan
    This a great showcase for vue communities and developers how the Vue is improved with promising features that help developers to build best performance and secured web application easily.

Video Transcription

1. Introduction to Vue.js Live 2024

Short description:

Hello everyone and welcome to Vue.js Live 2024. I'm Evan Yew, the creator of Vue and Vite. Today I'm super excited to share with you a 10 years retrospective on Vue.js. Vue is already 10 years old. In this talk, we'll see the history of Vue, its technical impact, and how we are keeping it alive. Vue has over 9,326 commits, 493 versions released, 2 million users worldwide, 250,000 GitHub stars, 4.9 million weekly npm downloads, and 1 billion monthly CDN requests on jsdeliver. Vue was the first framework to do tracking-based reactivity, combine single-file components with build tools, and explore a compiler-powered reactivity sugar. Vue also supports both template and virtual DOM render functions.

Hello everyone and welcome to Vue.js Live 2024. I'm Evan Yew, the creator of Vue and Vite. Today I'm super excited to share with you a 10 years retrospective on Vue.js. Yes, you heard that right. Vue is already 10 years old. Sounds like a very long time in front-end world. And of course, Vue is no longer a new technology, but in this talk we'll see some of the history of it and we'll also see what we're doing to Vue to keep it alive and well.

Okay, let's dive right into it. First of all, Vue's today in some numbers. Here are some stats of combined Vue.js slash Vue and Vue.js slash Core combined stats on GitHub. We have today over 9,326 commits across the two repositories. We have released over 493 versions of Vue. We have over 2 million users worldwide, 250,000 GitHub stars, 4.9 million weekly npm downloads, and over 1 billion monthly CDN requests on jsdeliver.

And we also want to talk about some of the technical impact of Vue, because despite using it day to day, maybe a lot of new users today aren't as familiar with the history of it and what ideas first came out of Vue and what ideas kind of influenced other technologies, right? Back in 2014, Vue was the first JavaScript framework to do deep tracking-based reactivity. Now, tracking-based reactivity is a paradigm that dates all the way back to Knockout.js and Meteor Tracker. That's an even older technology than Vue, but Vue was the first one to apply this principle into deep objects. So you can have an object mutated and things just work, and Vue was the first framework to do that. Vue was also the first framework to combine the idea of single-file components with build tools. The idea of single-file components isn't necessarily new. There was in fact an internal project at Google when I was working there, it was a source of inspiration. But Vue was the first one to combine this idea with a build tool called Browserify Backend, and later on, we also supported Webpack. But the ability of single-file components with build tools, the uniqueness of that is that we can use additional languages in these script blocks or template or style blocks. So you can use CoffeeScript back then, today you can mostly use TypeScript, you can use SAS, LASP, preprocessors, you can use PostCSS to process your CSS, you can even use POD, which was called Jade back then, different templates in text with templates. So Vue was the first framework to support this kind of usage. And Composition API was the first to combine Signo style reactivity, which is also the tracking-based reactivity that we talked about earlier, with modern component models. So you can use Vue refs in a script setup syntax with modern component models, and Vue was the first to actually combine that model into the model component model that we are all familiar with today. And Vue was also the first to explore a compiler-powered reactivity sugar for Signos in the form of the reactivity transform, which was an experimental proposal that we ran with for a period of time, but in the end we decided that it was not the best direction for Vue. However, we are actually pretty happy to see that this direction is being picked up by other frameworks, for example, Svelte 5, that actually is also exploring this direction. So it might be a better fit for Svelte, but we believe Vue is in a pretty good place with its own paradigm. Now, Vue is also unique in supporting both template and virtual DOM render functions.

2. Vue's Impact and Timeline

Short description:

Vue offers a balance between template syntax and manual render functions. Vue pioneered the concept of a progressive framework, allowing incremental adoption. The timeline of Vue includes the first release in 2013, reaching 1.0 in 2015, and the major rewrite in 2.0 in 2016. The work on Vue 3 started in 2018 and was soft launched in 2020 before becoming the default version in 2022. Vue 2 reached end of life in 2023. The technology adoption cycle includes triggers, expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and productivity.

This affords a very good balance that offers familiarity for users who prefer the template syntax and a smoother developer experience for people who prefer HTML-style templates. But at the same time, in advanced use cases and for library authors, you can still skip the template layer and drop down into manually writing render functions that gives you a lot more flexibility in doing advanced features.

And finally, Vue pioneered the concept of the progressive framework, the idea of a framework that is not monolithic, the idea that a framework can be made up of individual pieces but with a coherent design that you can adopt and use incrementally based on how much you need from the framework. I believe Vue is the first one to pioneer this idea, and it's also the only one that has implemented it really well.

Now, looking back, here's a brief timeline of what Vue did. We did the first release with the name Vue.js in 2013. That was the first time the name Vue.js ever appeared. But the public announcement was in February 2014. It remained as a side project for me for a very long time, and it took quite some time for me to polish it enough to feel comfortable, to feel confident to share it with the world. In October 2015, we reached 1.0. I actually took a long break in order to push it towards 1.0. And after 1.0, the template syntax largely set. In 2.0, we did the major rewrite, which we implemented the rendering to use virtual DOM, and was released in October 2016. 2016 was also the year that I started working on Vue full-time. Now, the work on Vue 3 actually started in September 2018. That was a very long time ago. But 3.0 took much, much longer than expected because of the scale of changes and the scale of impact on the ecosystem it created. Vue 2 was already very, very widely used, and the work on 3.0 was a learning process for us. There were definitely ups and downs, mistakes that were made, and lessons learned. So 3.0 was soft launched in September 2020, and eventually became the default version in January 2022. So the whole process took a few years. But we are really happy that the ecosystem has finally embraced Vue 3, and we'll see some stats later. So Vue 2 has officially reached end of life in December 2023. And we really encourage users who are still on Vue 2 to consider upgrading, or you should seek out relevant support to keep your Vue 2 versions running.

Now, so this was a really kind of like a nostalgic moment where I still have this blog post up somewhere talking about the first week of launch of Vue.js, and I was really happy that I got a few hundred GitHub stars in the first week, which was a great achievement for me back then. But after the initial launch, right, there were the moments, there were ups and downs where the reality hits. So I don't know if anyone has heard of the technology adoption cycle. There is, whenever a new technology comes out, there is a technology trigger. There's a peak of inflated expectations. Then there's the trial of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and finally you reach the plateau of productivity.

QnA