Inferno tried to be that and it succeeded to some extent too it powered Facebook KaiOS to hundreds of millions of users in production, for low-end devices that needed the low memory usage and high performance.
However, Octane provides far better developer ergonomics. It changes the design of React in key areas that fall-short. Such as hooks usage and even on things like
setState usage – where there is a third argument function that always provides you the latest value.Not only that, but Octane provides genuine APIs that avoid escape hatches, such as
useLinkedState, so you don't have to set state during render, or update refs during render and then have some lint rule complain at you that you can't do that.Octane was built on the shoulders of others, where we have the freedom of innovation to make these breaking changes, in an agentic world where humans are no longer writing the majority of the code. The transition is now easier than ever because of AI.
Dominic Gannaway