Tentative conclusion after being burned in performance too many times: Diffing (like in React, but by no means is this unique to React) is a sign that there's something wrong with your framework design.
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Diffing is mostly just a slow way to achieve incremental update of data structures. Whenever I'm tempted to add diffing (most recently, in display lists for Servo), I think about how to make incremental updates fast instead.
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Replying to @pcwalton @slightlylate
Interesting theory.Are there good examples of frameworks that have non diff based update strategies that keep clear expressiveness of React’s quasi-functional render method? If so great, let’s all move to that! If not you’re just expressing a preference for perf over simplicity
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That's stacking the deck. The better question is "can I efficiently manage partial updates in my app?". Presuming React's costs is bonkers.
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Replying to @slightlylate @pcwalton
That was the state of the world before React. The whole world recognized the benefit of the lowered cognitive load for the engineer and switched to diffing. Saying we should go back to the way we all walked away from without a fix for the cognitive load is short sighted
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No, it's not. One could have plausibly made that case in...say...'14 or '15. But not now. And I don't put this down to diffing specifically; it's the cultural shift away from product-level goals to developer-local goals that's fucking us.
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So, maybe you can afford React (in isolation), but you can't afford Modern Cultural Frontend (TM) unless you're exclusively targeting high-end desktop devices.
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