- Benchmarks are only for Safari and without good documentation for how they
were performed. Measurements are only in the 100ths of seconds where these
measurements should have much more granularity.
- The TodoMVC (arguably the most real-world) benchmark is nearly 50% slower
than virtual-DOM.
- virtual-DOM is fairly mature at this point where as MorphDOM looks very
young.
- virtual DOM implementations allow you to do things like React Native> virtual-DOM is fairly mature at this point where as MorphDOM looks very young.
morphdom is small and focused (about 220 lines of code). It either works or it doesn't and I have a decent amount of test cases to hopefully prove that it works (not to say that it is bug free... the DOM has lots of edge cases in some web browsers).
- virtual DOM implementations allow you to do things like React Native
This was built for the real DOM. While there can be value in abstractions, this was designed for a web browser.
This library can only get better. It's great to see someone trying to make a more lightweight React.
Also, you can see exactly how the benchmarks are run through the /test folder. My test using PhantomJS gave me the same results as the recorded statistics against Safari. And because it uses the browser's built in DOM toolkit rather than a virtual one, (in theory) it should become faster whenever browser DOMs become faster.
> it should become faster whenever browser DOMs become faster
The killer feature of React is that it made it possible to efficiently rerender the entire UI and for developers to not have to write code to manually manipulate the DOM. I hope browser vendors take note of this and do more to support this use case. Ideally, morphdom should not even exist and we could instead have the browser natively do the job of diffing/patching the DOM. Admittedly, there would have to be a lot of details to work out, but React, virtual-dom and morphdom are working in the right direction. Behind the scenes, the implementation might change and any good UI framework should make this a non-breaking change.
> And because it uses the browser's built in DOM toolkit rather than a virtual one, (in theory) it should become faster whenever browser DOMs become faster.
...as will all virtual-dom implementations get faster as JS becomes faster. I would argue that there is more attention paid to JS-speed than DOM-speed because there is a server-side (among other things).
For sure, also I must say how amazed I am about React's great ecosystem. In only a year a lot of high quality plugins have been created.
Can anyone point out any notable differences?
- morphdom does diffing between two real DOM trees while incremental-dom does diffing between virtual DOM nodes and real DOM nodes - incremental-dom is only meant to be used with templates that compile to use incremental-dom (won't work with templates that render to HTML strings) - morphdom can be used with any templating engine that produces an HTML string (or real DOM nodes) - With additional improvements, morphdom could be used to do diffing between a real DOM tree and a virtual DOM tree as long as the virtual DOM nodes are upgraded to real DOM nodes if they need to be added to the final real DOM. In addition, the virtual DOM nodes would need to have an API that overlaps with the API of real DOM nodes.
Also, it appears that incremental-dom doesn't reuse DOM nodes that move to a new parent, but I could be mistaken. Hopefully someone more familiar with incremental-dom will chime in.