Solid 2 vs Octane

NOTICE: I've summarized the perspectives of Octane's and Solid's creators here, for anyone short on time: https://gist.github.com/aleclarson/829c10aa7d287944ef75e1c2a90bef06

I'm a React/Preact/Astro developer with an interest in other renderers. The two that have most caught my eye recently are Octane (from Dominic Gannaway of React Hooks / Svelte / Inferno fame) and Solid 2.

I asked ChatGPT to compare them with its own "Renderer DX Pillars", which I've shared below. This is its gut instinct, with very little hedging:

Pillar	Winner	Why
State architecture freedom	Solid 2	Reactivity is independent of components. Much less component gravity.
Reactive reasoning	Solid 2	The dependency graph is explicit and causal. Easier to answer “why did this update?”
Derived state & synchronization	Solid 2	Fine-grained derivation is the native model; less need to coordinate state manually.
Async/data flow	Solid 2	This is basically Solid 2's flagship idea. Async being part of reactivity feels deeper than improving Suspense/hooks ergonomics.
Component authoring	Octane	Normal values, normal functions, familiar TSX, fewer Solid-specific semantic gotchas.
Escape hatches	Solid 2, narrowly	Solid's primitives compose very directly with imperative JS without pretending everything is a component concern.
Ecosystem interoperability	Octane	If its React-ecosystem compatibility ambitions work, this could be a huge advantage.
Tooling & debuggability	Solid 2 today	More mature and battle-tested. Octane's compiler creates more invisible machinery that tooling has to explain well.
Architectural scaling	Solid 2	Its reactive model naturally lets domain/application architecture exist independently of rendering.

So my gut scoreboard is:

Solid 2: 7 Octane: 2

But the two Octane wins are meaningful ones.

Where Octane feels strongest

Its pitch seems particularly strong around:

“I want React's authoring experience without React's runtime/design baggage.”

You get something like:

function Counter() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  const doubled = count * 2;

  return <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>
    {doubled}
  </button>;
}

That's extremely approachable.

Solid asks you to internalize:

const [count, setCount] = createSignal(0);
const doubled = () => count() * 2;

which isn't hard, but it is a different programming model.

So for day-one DX, I wouldn't be surprised if Octane feels better.

Where Solid feels fundamentally stronger

Solid's advantages seem to accumulate as the application becomes less like:

some components with state

and more like:

a complex reactive application that happens to have a UI.

That's where signals outside components, ownership, fine-grained derivation, async graph semantics, stores, and independent domain state all start reinforcing each other.

My gut says the trajectory looks something like:

small app

Octane  ██████████
Solid   █████████

         ↓ complexity

large/stateful app

Octane  ████████
Solid   ████████████

Not because Octane necessarily scales poorly, but because Solid's abstraction seems closer to the actual problem being modeled once state relationships get complicated.

The pillar I'd be least confident about

Escape hatches.

Octane could easily end up winning there if its compiler makes effects, refs, subscriptions and integration code extraordinarily pleasant.

And ecosystem interoperability could become an overwhelming Octane win if their compatibility layer is genuinely broad and reliable rather than “we have adapters for the popular demos.”

My strongest instincts

If I had to assign confidence rather than points:

Solid strongly wins: state architecture, derived state, async, architectural scaling.
Solid probably wins: reactive reasoning, escape hatches.
Octane strongly wins: initial component authoring.
Octane probably wins: ecosystem interoperability.
Solid wins for now: tooling/maturity.

The biggest question I'd personally want answered before choosing between them is therefore not performance.

It's:

Does Octane's compiler actually eliminate the architectural drawbacks of component-centric reactivity, or does it mostly make that model much nicer to write?

If it's the latter, I'd expect Solid 2 to remain the stronger foundation for complex applications.

PatrickJS/solid-2-versus-octane.md

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