Forge and Fabric mod loaders

Forge has been the main choice of people who create mods for Minecraft for a long time. In 2018, a new mod loader and API named Fabric was created. Since then, these two mod loaders have been compared to each other in terms of features. In this article, I will explain how they differ.

Forge

Forge was created in 2011. It solved the problem of mod inter-compatibility, meaning that mod authors could write code in a way that would not conflict with other mods's code. Forge has become a feature-rich API.

Fabric

Fabric's design differs from Forge. It is modular and is able to target Minecraft snapshots, allowing it to update faster. Its API is not as rich as Forge's, instead it relies on Mixins to provide modders with ability to implement desired features.

Comparison

• Forge has more features out of the box than Fabric.
• Depening on your mod loadout, Fabric can be lighter than Forge.
• Forge used to lack Mixin subsystem, but recently it included it, so Fabric has no advantage here anymore.
• For gaining access to protected, private and package-private Java fields and methods, Forge uses access transformer system. Fabric uses access widener system, which, in my experience, works faster.
• Fabric requires you to manually run Minecraft source code generation task and the generated source code contains some compilation errors, while Forge provides source code out of the box without errors.
• Forge can generate correct run configurations for IDEs, while Fabric sometimes has problems with it. It is more reliable to run Fabric projects via Gradle task.
• Some features for Fabric like mod configurations are provided via third-party libraries due to its design philosophy. Forge usually includes such essential things.

Summary

There exist Fabric-exclusive and Forge-exclusive mods, but many mods exist on both loaders. Ability to develop mods on both loaders usually depends on authors' amount of free time or limitations of the API.

My preference

I as a modder prefer Forge over Fabric, because Forge provides more features and is very versatile. But I do have mods that exist on both loaders for player convenience. Also my computer is not low-end.