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Discussion on: What Do You Think About the Virtual DOM?

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solkimicreb profile image
Miklos Bertalan • Edited

I always had mixed feelings towards this topic.

  • I like JSX and CSS-in-JS and I think they are not stranger than some domain specific HTML extensions for templating.

  • I think the speed argument is more of a marketing trick that went surprisingly well. The new vDOM is 'zero runtime' in this sense and I am not convinced by it either. Benchmarks should be used to spot extremely bad raw performance and to fix sily errors.

  • I secretly hope that PWAs will prevail over React Native. There is a big difference between 'Learn once, use everywhere' and 'Write once, use everywhere'. I admit that creating a truly nice mobile experience on the web is super difficult though.

  • I don't really like the persistent nature of current vDOM implementations and I prefered the state level diffing of AngularJS over the view level reconcilation of React. I feel like the latter results in slower apps and codebases bloated with memoization and other performance tricks.

Ultimately I would prefer to have JSX as my templating language with state level diffing and real DOM behind it instead of the vDOM. I don't know if this is possible though.