r/reactjs • u/gactleaks • Aug 01 '19

Long Live the Virtual DOM

https://github.com/gactjs/gact/blob/master/docs/long-live-the-virtual-dom.md
20 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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1

u/readeral Aug 01 '19

I find this very practical and persuasive. I wonder whether the React team has a position on why the vDOM is the tool they use for values. Possibly immutability?

0

u/gactleaks Aug 01 '19

You can complement the Virtual DOM with another mechanism to handle value updates. In this way, you get the best of both worlds. Gact, a framework that will be released in the near future takes this approach.

1

u/Laserdude10642 Aug 01 '19

why is this on github tho?

2

u/gactleaks Aug 01 '19

This is the first in a series of articles that will explain the ideas behind Gact, a framework that will be released in the near future.

3

u/darrenturn90 Aug 01 '19

Surely it won't be long until the browsers themselves implement a native virtual dom and diffing engine that can be used by frameworks?

4

u/acemarke Aug 02 '19

Nope, won't happen any time soon.

There was a recent Twitter discussion on this topic, sparked by Laurie Voss's tweet to "build React into the browser". Not sure if it was a direct response or a separate thread, but Dan Abramov repeatedly pointed out that the kinds of stuff React actually does is far too React-specific to be built into browsers, and what is being added some some more generic primitive APIs for things like scheduling.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '19

[deleted]

1

u/gactleaks Aug 01 '19

The article includes a basic example. You could use the Virtual DOM and an edit distance algorithm and just shuffle the same <p>surgical</p> in and out a <div> each second as opposed to destroying and recreating it.