Echo JS 0.11.0

Is it possible that patent anxiety prompted the invention of this React competitor/clone?

I thought Alibaba was pushing Vue.js?

Alibaba is too large company to choose only a single frameworks. They are cooperating with Vuejs author. But as far as I know some teams of them are just building they stack on top React, for example https://ant.design/ .

I can't find real differences with react, that would make me want to switch from one to the other

I would not suggest saying "switch". Alibaba is using Web technology heavily so they need the code to be really fast and  if the size is smaller then it's even better. Also they want to script Weex low-level APIs with it.

So they just built one on their own and encourage the community to use it.

RAX vs React vs Inferno vs Preact vs Riot.
Competition is good!

I would say Rax is targeting React Native.

How? React Native is for cross-platform mobile applications while Rax only works in a web browser, as far as I can tell.

edit: Appears you're right, from the Rax tutorial [1]: "Rax is like React + React Native, you can use a component in the same way both in native and web as building blocks. " I guess this is possible because it's built on weex [2].

1: https://github.com/alibaba/rax/blob/master/docs/tutorial.md
2: https://weex-project.io/

I knew it because I met one of the authors in Hangzhou and got introduced. :P

Weex is that kind platform, try my post https://hashnode.com/post/run-vanilla-javascript-hello-world-in-weex-ciy1dn0sp001s91533k6h8sc7