(Neo)Forge vs Fabric

This is one of my hotter takes. I think that (Neo)Forge and Fabric are equally bad/good mod loaders.

People often say that Fabric is the "lighter" loader, but in reality that's very much not the case anymore. They both have a plethora of performance mods, and most of them are xplat now too. Forge performance especially improved post 1.15, and the two basically launch and run at the same speed in most cases.

I also see people saying that Fabric is lighter because it doesn't package the library with it, however this actually makes it *heavier* if you think about it. The Fabric API is packaged into many smaller modules, which I've seen people jar-in-jar before (Sodium JiJs part of the library). This is utterly stupid, *every* single modpack on Fabric is going to use FAPI, meaning that JiJ'ing it is just wasting resources.

Though my major issue with FAPI is the modular structure of it. Sure, a modular structure is nice... until you think about the fact that it's distributed monolithically for users *and* developers. Nearly every Fabric developer depends on the whole FAPI and not modules since it's a million times more convenient. The API being split into multiple modules just feels really annoying to manage. Then again, I don't work on the FAPI, so I could very well be mistaken on the ease-of-development benefit that may or may not exist.

As for (Neo)Forge, I also think that it has issues. Notably, the event bus... I don't like "magic code" (macros, annotations, etc), and the Forge event bus is literally that. I *do* however like that the event bus provides events for most of the places where I would otherwise need to mixin, which means that mod compatibility is much more likely. On the other hand, there are great tools for developing mixins now (mc-dev and mods such as mixin trace), which help significantly... until someone decides to @Overwrite where they REALLY didn't need to. That's a different issue though.

In terms of modding, both loaders are equally bad/good, and it's really just personal preference. I primarily mod on NeoForge since that's where I have the most experience and am most comfortable, but I can develop on Fabric too.

In terms of modpacking, NeoForge has more potential right now *in my opinion*. Connector helps significantly in this, however opposite projects such as Kilt may make each loader perfectly balanced (as all things should be /reference). Ultimately, when I am modpacking, I use whichever loader provides the core mods for my modpack. I.e, if I'm making a tech pack around GTCEuM, I'll use NeoForge 1.21.1, since that's the version that the mod targets. For a Spectrum pack, I'll use Fabric 1.21.1 for the same reason.