The most striking similarity was the use of a virtual DOM. Like Ractive, React had discovered that creating an abstract representation of the DOM allows for lightning-fast operations by minimising the amount of DOM manipulation (the bottleneck in most webapps) that needs to take place. It also facilitates server-side rendering without some of the crazy hacks users of other tools have had to employ.
Another was the focus on reactive programming. This is one of those phrases that threatens to become meaningless with overuse, but it's a useful concept. Put simply, in a reactive system where the value of bdepends on the value of a, if a changes then b will also change. Applied to user interfaces, that means that when your application state changes, your view also changes. With traditional MVC libraries you typically have to implement all your render logic manually and wire it up with a web of publish/subscribe events; with React and Ractive you're spared that (tedious, error-prone, hard-to-optimise) step when building your apps.
Finally, both libraries believe that the way to help developers build complex apps is to give them tools that encourage simplicity and composability and then get out of their way.
Having said all that, there are also some stark differences.
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