Feature request: a build of @preact/signals with no dependency on preact/hooks

[jakelazaroff]

Since diving into Preact and @preact/signals, I find they're actually much nicer with class components than functional components — so much so that I'm not using hooks at all. Unfortunately, since @preact/signals depends on preact/hooks, the latter gets imported even though it's only a transitive dependency.

Looking at the source, it mostly doesn't rely on preact/hooks for "core" functionality (as in, not used for hooks wrappers like useSignal) except for the SignalValue component that binds signals to text nodes. I tried converting it to a class component; it doesn't pass the tests but seems to work in a toy app I threw together. (I think this would also require a new entrypoint, since preact/hooks's side effects prevent it from being tree shaken.)

Is this something you'd be interested in supporting? If so, I'm happy to try to open a PR. I realize it would only save 1–2kb gzipped, but since Preact is so small that actually ends up being a significant amount of the library's weight.

[JoviDeCroock]

In #718 this was explored and we concluded that this might just not be worth it as we're adding bytes to signals while the ecosystem still uses hooks. I am personally not convinced that we should do this as we'll add bytes in the grand scheme of things, we'd need a larger ecosystem restructure where i.e. preact-iso and others stop using hooks as well.

Currently the usage of hooks also means that Prefresh (fast-refresh for preact) works for free as well. Changing that would require a larger rethinking of how Prefresh works as well.