Why does kobalte not use zag.js?

[samuelstroschein]

Hi @fabien-ml,

I was wondering why you don't use ZagJS as primitives under the hood (we briefly tweeted).

I just talked to David Di Biase. He shined some new light on why you don't use ZagJS. But, could you explain in your words why you don't use ZagJS?

PS We (inlang) are looking to adopt a component library. ZagJS looks promising but is a bit too low level. Kobalte seems good but too early and I fear that a lot of duplicate work is conducted/Kobalte could progress faster if ZagJS would be used.

[fabien-ml]

Hi,

• I don't like ZagJS API which is like React Aria (call function and spread props everywhere).
• I don't want to rely on a 3rd party library for the core of Kobalte.
• I want complete control over the API.
• I want to know how to build things on my own.

[fabien-ml]

No, I don't want to create a wrapper around Zag.

[samuelstroschein]

Besides not wanting to wrap Zag. Would it potentially speed up the development of Kobalte?

[fabien-ml]

I guess yes, because I will no longer need to worry about accessibility which is handled by Zag.

Kobalte will be just a "component layer" on top of Zag, like React Aria Components is a layer on top of React Aria hooks.

[samuelstroschein]

Solid's bottleneck is the ecosystem which leads to migration discussions like opral/monorepo#420, wouldn't it make sense for Solid's and Kobalte's adoption to quickly build a component library that uses Zag to handle accessibility?

You could ofc extend ZagJS, or build your own hooks in the future after Kobalte serves the need of the majority of users.

[samuelstroschein]

I am trying to say that Solid needs to ramp up quickly to find its place in the JS world. I understand that full control is nice; understanding how everything works makes the engineering heart beat faster but ... users want/need to quickly built things. How Kobalte works under the hood is not a concern of users and makes people switch to React/Svelte/Vue instead :(

[fabien-ml]

I'm closing this since there is https://ark-ui.com which may fit your requirements.