The diffing is mostly an implementation deatil that is abstracted away. React could check to see if props.items changed instead of the nonsense it does. If it still does that in 2021.
The thing is vue uses getters and setters that would trigger direct changes without needing to diff the entire tree. It could theoretically be really fast, but it still used a virtual dom, and it was around react speeds, give or take.
I am convinced that if react really wanted to, they could make optimizations to make it really close to svelte. I remember seeing a tweet by Evan You about vue3 being pretty much as fast svelte if not slightly faster.
The point is that speed, when it comes to front-end frameworks, is a weird thing. There are other factors that are much more important like tooling, stability, code style, dealing with animations, etc.
Things like svelte's compiler approach are much more interesting and unique selling points.
> I am convinced that if react really wanted to, they could make optimizations to make it really close to svelte
Facebook has been working for a while on Ahead-Of-Time compilation for React. Interestingly, it looks like they thought the problem was too complicated and they gave up:
> To address this challenge we initially experimented with one approach to ahead-of-time (AOT) optimization — Prepack — but ultimately that direction did not pan out. Specifically, we realized that many AOT optimizations don’t work because they either don’t have enough global knowledge or they have too little. For example, a component might be static in practice because it always receive a constant string from its parent, but the compiler can’t see that far and thinks the component is dynamic. Even when we could make optimizations work, we found that they were unpredictable to the developer. Without predictability it was hard for developers to rely on them.
The diffing is mostly an implementation deatil that is abstracted away. React could check to see if props.items changed instead of the nonsense it does. If it still does that in 2021.
The thing is vue uses getters and setters that would trigger direct changes without needing to diff the entire tree. It could theoretically be really fast, but it still used a virtual dom, and it was around react speeds, give or take.
I am convinced that if react really wanted to, they could make optimizations to make it really close to svelte. I remember seeing a tweet by Evan You about vue3 being pretty much as fast svelte if not slightly faster.
The point is that speed, when it comes to front-end frameworks, is a weird thing. There are other factors that are much more important like tooling, stability, code style, dealing with animations, etc.
Things like svelte's compiler approach are much more interesting and unique selling points.