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Discussion on: React vs Signals: 10 Years Later

 
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Jeremy Ong

I think what is swaying me so far is not necessarily the ergonomics, but efficiency. Intuitively, React to me feels like an "immediate mode" UI, where each time a node in the tree needs to re-render, all children process their hooks to determine what effects and derivations need to reprocess. Solid's approach on the other hand resembles "retained" UI architectures, where a component function describes data dependencies and returns a node to add to a tree. In fact, the usage of the VDOM in React makes sense in this light, since most immediate rendering architectures also rely on shadow state for efficiency. Both approaches are valid, to be sure, with different sets of tradeoffs, but as mentioned, I gravitate a bit more to the Solid approach to doing things. My personal bias is likely my experience as a graphics programmer operating in a primarily C++ world though.