Forge & Fabric difference

[winnetrie]

Hi, all.

This post is not about criticizing or demand anything. Please do not be offended, i merely trying to understand things why and how.

 

So i saw on Reddit the Fabric team bragging having released their Fabric modloader 2 minutes after mc 1.16 released.

I wonder how can they do that so fast and forge not? Is Forge much more complicated? Do the Forge devs have no time/money/resources?

Is fabric being sponsored? What's holding up the Forge team? Is there anything we can help?

What's the difference between Fabric & Forge?

[DavidM]

I haven't used Fabric before, but from what I've heard:

Forge uses an event driven system. Fabric (IIRC) treats all mods as coremods (mixins).

This makes Fabric significantly more lightweight than Forge,  and therefore quicker to develop and update. I wouldn't be surprised if a Forge update's workload is more than 10 times the workload of a Fabric update.

However, since Fabric mods use mixins, it is very easy to cause incompatibilities between mods (think of Forge coremods), while Forge's event system can theoretically supports infinite amount of mods.

 

Apart from that, Forge has a much bigger user base than Fabric, therefore the Forge team has to respond to more PRs and issues. I imagine this to be very time consuming.

Edited June 25, 2020 by DavidM

[DaemonUmbra]

Fabric is INCREDIBLY lightweight, they provide the loader and a minimal API, this allows them to be quite agile but by the same token modders must make heavy use of Mixins (coremods) to write their own hooks into the Minecraft code, which is typically not good for stability if done poorly or when many are combined in a single modpack.

 

Forge on the other hand is a bit of a fat bastard but comes with a ton of utilities and hooks set up with the goal of providing everything a modder needs so they never need to directly modifiy the Minecraft code, essentially Forge tries to do the ugly so modders never have to.

[LexManos]

This has been asked and answered many many times...

Our mod launcher was updated to 1.16 about 18 months before it even came out. Considering our mod launcher doesn't care what you target. It works for any java application doesn't even have to be Minecraft.

 

As for MCP, it took about 35 seconds for the RC1->Release process to run.

About about 55 mins for the unit tests to run and make sure things wouldn't break for end users.

1.16->1.16.1 again took about 30 seconds, with another 55 mins of testing and making sure shit won't break.

I could slap something together that "works" and release it. I could, but i won't.

It's a matter of scope, and quality.

 

 

[yuusha]

So Fabric is JavaScript and Forge is Ruby? 😛

[winnetrie]

Thank you for answering and my apoligies for bothering you.

On fabric they say : forge is old and laggy. Fabric is new and shiny. I disagree. I prefer forge and i think you do all great work.

[DaemonUmbra]

There's definitely drama between small groups in Forge and Fabric, some of Fabric's fans have been anti-Forge since before Fabric was a thing and now they have a non-Forge loader to hide behind.

I haven't personally seen their Forge counterparts, but Fabric's Discord moderators have assured me they exist.

[DavidM]

  On 6/25/2020 at 3:08 PM, winnetrie said:

On fabric they say : forge is old and laggy. Fabric is new and shiny.

Expand  

If someone benchmarks a clean Forge install and a Fabric install, then the performance might be a tiny bit (not even noticeable) better on Fabric's side due to its lightweight.

However such result is not conclusive, as Forge does a lot more (event system, utils, etc) than Fabric. Try benchmarking both API with 100+ mods and Forge API will manifest its advantage.

Judging APIs solely for its performance is like comparing Tetris to a first person shooter game. "Hey Tetris uses up less RAM and CPU so it is much better than the FPS game!"

 

But yeah, people might prefer Fabric if all they want is to add a simple tweak/mod to the game. At the end of the day, it is really up to the user and his/her use case.

Edited June 27, 2020 by DavidM