The example is also unrepresentative of anything meaningful. TodoMVC[0] is the classic point of comparison, and the Backbone version is a nightmare to grok compared to React[2].
Who wants to maintain this nightmare? https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/ba...
Devs love to invoke Chesterton's fence but somehow forget about it when looking back on "the good old days."
What's worse, there were never good old days for frontend. It always sucked, and now it still sucks--just far less.
[0]: https://todomvc.com/
[1]: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/ba...
[2]: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/re...
In React vs. Backbone in 2025tastejs
todomvc
JavaScript2011–2025
tastejs / todomvc
todomvc
Helping you select a JavaScript framework - Todo apps for React.js, Angular, Vue and many more
35Distinct people
39Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
29KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Helping you select a JavaScript framework - Todo apps for React.js, Angular, Vue and many more
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I highly recommend this road as well. Three exercises along the lines of the parent that I found particularly valuable: 1. Compare VanillaJS TodoMVC to your framework of choice…
sirgawain33 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year39 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-09-12 12:22:56 UTC to 2025-10-25 18:52:01 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Helping you select a JavaScript framework
Website Blog TasteJS
Developers have a number of choices today when it comes to selecting a JavaScript framework or UI library for building scalable web apps.
React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid, Lit... the list of solutions continues to grow, but just how do you decide on which to use in a sea of so many options?
To help solve this problem, we created TodoMVC - a project which offers the same Todo application implemented in most of the popular JavaScript frameworks of the day. Each example is functionally identical and follows the same app specification, so you can compare syntax, structure, and idioms side by side on equal footing.
TodoMVC has been the de-facto teaching example for UI frameworks for over a decade, and forms the core of the cross-browser Speedometer benchmark used by every major browser engine to optimize UI performance.
Examples
The actively maintained examples in this repo are kept current with their framework's latest stable line. As of TodoMVC 2.0:
React 19
Vue 3.5
Angular 21
Svelte 5 (with runes)
Preact 10
Lit 3.3
React Redux 9 (with Redux Toolkit 2)
Plenty of legacy framework showcases also live in examples/ for historical reference. See the website for the full list.
Build a TodoMVC App with Your AI Coding Agent
The app spec is plain Markdown and reads cleanly into any modern AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini Code Assist, Aider, and so on). To generate a fresh implementation in a framework or language that isn't on the list above, drop this prompt into your agent of choice:
Build a TodoMVC app following this spec https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tastejs/todomvc/refs/heads/master/app-spec.md in React
Replace React with Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid, Lit, Preact, Qwik, or any framework or language you want to evaluate. The result follows the same behavioural surface every example in this repo implements (add, edit, toggle, filter, route, clear completed), so it's directly comparable to the reference apps.
Running the examples and tests
Each example builds and serves itself. Most modern apps use Vite, webpack, or rollup; cd into an example, install, and run:
$ cd examples/react
$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ npm run serve
To run the Cypress test suite against the maintained examples:
$ npm install
$ npm run test:all
npm run test:all defaults to the curated modern set. Pass --all to sweep every example in examples/, or --framework=react to target a single one. See tests/README.md for details.
Team
TodoMVC would not be possible without a strong team of contributors helping push the project forward each day. Additionally, we have a core project team composed of:
Addy Osmani - Founder/Lead
Addy is a Software Engineer at Google who originally created TodoMVC. He oversees the project direction, maintenance and organizes the planning and development efforts of the team.
Sindre Sorhus - Lead Developer
Sindre is a Web Developer who leads core development, quality control and application design for the project. His engineering contributions have helped us ensure consistency and best practices are enforced wherever possible. Sindre also leads up development of the TodoMVC application spec.
Pascal Hartig - Developer
Pascal is a Software Engineer at Twitter with a deep passion for consistency. He watches pull requests and helps developers getting their contributions integrated with TodoMVC.
Stephen Sawchuk - Developer
Stephen is a Front-end Engineer at Quicken Loans that cares about improving the maintainability and developer experience of open-source projects. His recent contributions include helping us move all apps over to using Bower and implementing the new information bar.
Colin Eberhardt - Developer
Colin is a software consultant at Scott Logic who is passionate about all software - from JavaScript to Java, and C# to Objective-C. His recent contribution to the project has been a fully automated test suite.
Sam Saccone - Developer
Sam is a Software Engineer at Google who is driven by an endless desire to create, solve problems, and improve developers' lives.
Arthur Verschaeve - Developer
Arthur is an open-source fanboy from Belgium. He is passionate about developer tooling and all things JavaScript.
Fady Samir Sadek - Developer
Fady is a front-end developer who loves all things JavaScript and enjoys solving real world problems using the web platform and helping other developers do the same. He currently leads maintenance of the project and ensures that the project is friendly for new contributors and upcoming developers.
Gianni Chiappetta - Logo designer
Gianni is a programmer and designer currently working as the Chief Rigger at MetaLab.
Disclaimer
TodoMVC has been called many things including the 'Speed-dating' and 'Rosetta Stone' of JavaScript frameworks. Whilst we hope that this project can offer assistance in deciding what frameworks are worth spending more time looking at, remember that the Todo application offers a limited view of a framework's potential capability.
It is meant to be used as a gateway to reviewing how a basic application using a framework may be structured, and we heavily recommend investing time researching a solution in more depth before opting to use it.
Also, please keep in mind that TodoMVC is not the perfect way to compare the size of different frameworks. We intentionally use the unminified versions to make reading the source code easier.
Getting Involved
Whilst we enjoy implementing and improving existing Todo apps, we're always interested in speaking to framework authors (and users) wishing to share Todo app implementations in their framework/solution of choice.
Check out our contribution docs for more info.
License
Everything in this repo is MIT License unless otherwise specified.
MIT © Addy Osmani, Sindre Sorhus, Pascal Hartig, Stephen Sawchuk.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
39 sourcesGP was from me :)
You stated: "Most React apps need a backend too."
But in reality this is irrelevant to the conversation, because the top post was asking if comparing HTMX to React is like apples to oranges, which it is, because both tools accomplish different things with completely different feature-sets.
A good example of this is the implementation of TodoMVC. [1] React's implementation can live completely in the browser, and even be stateful. [2] An implementation with HTMX requires a server to handle templating/rendering. [3]
[1] https://todomvc.com/
[2] https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples/reac...
[3] https://github.com/rajasegar/todomvc-htmx
In React 19TodoMVC/examples has 40+ open source todo apps written with various popular and obscure frameworks: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples
In I couldn't find a free, no-login, no-AI checklist app–so I built oneAnd that was my original point, using React for a small one page thing like this is grossly overkill but Vue is a good smaller alternative at this scale that gives you most benefits.
I looked at the jQuery example above and checked the Vue example in the same repo. That example has about as many lines total but the Vue example is 30% smaller in total due to shorter lines.
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/vu...
In Bongo CatThanks for sharing. I have very little experience with game engines but React/Vue always resembled them to me a bit. Here's the data, render when changed. I just don't think it's needed in most Web cases.
Sure, if you attach behavior code to every interactive element directly, all of which are controlling the same portion of the screen and depending on each other, it's a recipe for a mess.
If, however, you call somewhat generalized functions on those events, with basic DRY strategies in mind, it's all very clear and manageable well into the thousands of lines, with no need of running a gaming engine in JS, creating a templating language that must be transpiled, etc.
edit:
>less manual code
jQuery code if often smaller and clearer, I mean check this classic:
jQuery:
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/jq...
React:
ht
Read the rest
tps://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
Looking at the framework-less ES6 implementation makes me hope I never have to maintain code like this.
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/va...
In The Cost of JavaScript FrameworksI found this guy creating a todo app using all popular js frameworks
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples
including vue.js riot.js react, meteor, angular 1,2 dojo, duel, ember, jquery ....
it's a great way to compare frameworks
In Vue.js 2.1 Released* Backend performance: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
* Frontend examples: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc
In Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?I don't know much about Ember, so I don't want to compare it with NX here. I just submitted an NX todoMVC: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/pull/1679/files. If you would like to, you can compare it with the Ember one: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples/embe....
Side note: since it seems like comparisons are requested, I plan to implement the official show off/introduction apps of other frameworks in NX as a way of objective comparison.
In Show HN: A next gen front-end framework with lots of editable examplesThe cost of transpiling es2015 isn't very visible here, because the "vanilla es6 TodoMVC" example used [1] doesn't rely heavily on ES6 only features, such as generator functions etc., that aren't just sugar on top of ES5.
Such features are expected to decrease the performance of the generated code significantly and should be taken into account when a transpilation step is involved.
[1] https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples/vani...
In The cost of transpiling ES2015 in 2016I highly recommend this road as well.
Three exercises along the lines of the parent that I found particularly valuable:
1. Compare VanillaJS TodoMVC to your framework of choice
http://todomvc.com/
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/va...
What does the framework buy you? Is the framework-powered code easier to read? Easier to understand for a newcomer to the code base?
2. Read every line of Effective Javascript (it's short and eminently practical) and write out every code example.
http://www.amazon.com/Effective-JavaScript-Specific-Software...
There are about a dozen small errors in the code in the book, see if you can find them.
3. Read substack's alternative Javascript build flow:
http://substack.net/task_automation_with_npm_run
Think about the possibilities and limitations. (I personally love his approach at the b
Read the rest
eginning of projects when I could care less about fiddling with gulp and want to get into exploring the guts of a problem)
Here's my unscientific LOC count results (that I did in 5 minutes).
I've removed node_modules and bower_components from the items in:
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/examples
I've also deleted "polymer" and "emberjs_require" since they didn't have any files in them and messes up the `wc -l`
$ for x in *; do echo $x; wc -l `find $x/ -name '*js*' -type f | egrep -v 'test|lib|public|vendor|.bundle.js|.cache.js'`; echo; done
Results:
http://pastebin.com/GqF0g3qF
Obviously one can improve the filtering to get more accurate results but you get the point.
To make a TODO mvc you need at least 5+ different files and totalling a lot of lines. The fact that jQuery solution (which is very nice code, not the typical spaghetti) beats the majority of them in line count is pretty ironic.
In Create a character voting app using React, Node.js, MongoDB and Socket.ioI think the problem lies in the '.js.erb'. Write javascript in separate javascript files (in app/assets/javascripts/) and use JSON to get data from the rails backend.
Have you seen this? http://todomvc.com/ You can try implementing a backend in Rails for the jquery example. https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/jq....
The JS file shows how to organize javascript code - https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/jq...
Also unless you really like coffeescript, stick with javascript. If the syntax is bothering you, you can write in ES6 (next version of javascript) which has nicer syntax and use babel to convert to ES5
1. https://gist.github.com/danielgtaylor/0b60c2ed1f069f118562
2. http://justicen.com/#/posts/74046fea9a4c61477db9
In React.js Introduction for People Who Know Just Enough JQueryI love Angular for how it allows to seprate concerns cleanly. You view logic goes to templates and directives. Your data/bisness logic goes to controllers. When developer writes controller he thinks in terms of data he works with. When developer writes view he thinks in temrs of how to represent data available to him from scope.
I hate how in Backbone or just jQuery way you have mess of html, javascript and data manipulation in same class... Reminds of how messy frameworkless PHP looks...
Now looking at some React examples I see jsx files that do same mess... Model manipulation, some logic and html code in same file... WTF? How is that good?
May be someone can point me to a good example app of using React with good speration of concerns? Classical TODO MVC looks horrible...
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/blob/gh-pages/examples/re...
In The road to Ember 2.0 RFCAbout the project:
http://todomvc.com/
Link to other examples:
https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples
In Shortest TodoMVC implementationShowing the 15 most recent of 39 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.