It's not the same, though. Those are compiling textual templates into executable JavaScript. React/Preact do this automatically, too.

What Glimmer does is it converts your views into bytecode (not JavaScript) which can be streamed and run without a JavaScript compilation / parsing phase in the browser. Vue, React, and Angular views all ultimately are translated into JavaScript which has to be compiled / parsed in each browser.

I'll have a look at Glimmer later, but who executes this bytecode?

> They are instantly executable by a small VM written as a JS library

Guess you have download the VM on initial page load.

Yes. It's about 18KB of JavaScript.

glimmer-vm https://github.com/glimmerjs/glimmer-vm

Is it more similar to Vue server-side rendering (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/ssr.html)? Or are Glimmer and server-side rendering two different beasts?

Two different beasts.