4 ms·

This is the first I'm hearing of incremental-dom. Can anyone explain what it is? According to their readme: > It differs from the established virtual DOM appro

• ajanuary 11y ago
  From "Introducing Incremental DOM" [1] Incremental DOM changes the model to be a single phase: While creating the new (virtual) DOM tree walk along the existing tree and figure out changes as you go. Allocate no memory if there is no change; if there is, mutate the existing tree (only allocating memory if absolutely necessary) and apply the diff to the physical DOM. [1] https://medium.com/google-developers/introducing-incremental-dom-e98f79ce2c5f https://medium.com/google-developers/introducing-incremental...
  • woah 11y ago
    Hehe "physical DOM"
• ivank 11y ago
  With incremental-dom, you're still re-running code to "generate" an entire DOM tree on every state change, so you have the React-like convenience and correctness of not writing individual mutations. But it doesn't create an intermediate represention like React. Instead, incremental-dom patches the real DOM as soon as your code calls into the elementOpen/elementClose/etc functions. Thus, significantly reduced memory allocations and GC thrashing.
  • legutierr 11y ago
    I poked around on vdom benchmark[1], and I got the following times: incremental-dom 0.1.0 276343 React 0.13.1 586353 mithril 0.2.0 602722 virtual-dom 2.0.1 99136 Does anyone know what is going on here? The argument I've heard frequently in favor of React, for instance, is that touching the DOM at all is very slow, so React makes things more efficient by only touching the DOM after the virtual DOM diff has been calculated. Is that argument correct? Is reading the DOM actually not so problematic, as long as the modification you make to it are minimal (which seems to be the strategy here)? One conceivable advantage of this approach seems to be that you can use the native event system directly, but I can't find any mention of event handling in the documentation. I'm wondering if a kind of flux-type architecture would work here, but using jquery, say, to subscribe to events. [1] http://vdom-benchmark.github.io/vdom-benchmark/ http://vdom-benchmark.github.io/vdom-benchmark/
    • ShellfishMeme 11y ago
      Virtual DOM approaches never really were about performance. They are about being able to write idempotent render functions in declarative style so that you don't need to deal with massive amounts of DOM state management. In the end you want to write a function that just expresses what the state of the DOM should be depending on the input parameters and have something deal with applying those changes to a very stateful API. If the application state changes, all you want to do is say 'things have changed somehow, just re-render this component'. This was possible before with classic templating, but it wasn't very efficient and had problems when dealing with re-rendering interactive elements. You would lose focus on input fields for example, and had to use some post-render hooks to fix the state of the DOM up afterwards. Using virtual DOM structures fixed this problem in an elegant way and allowed rendering to the DOM to be integrated into more functional programming styles, which made more reactive architectures possible. It all boils down to humans not being good with reasoning about state changes over time and how to express those imperatively. The only solution to that is not to do it and go more functional. This is also why I am not a big fan of things like incremental-dom. It ignores the whole idea why we wanted declarative DOM handling in the first place and replaces it with a very imperative and side-effect heavy API. In that case, just use the DOM directly.
      • ivank 11y ago
        > This is also why I am not a big fan of things like incremental-dom. It ignores the whole idea why we wanted declarative DOM handling in the first place and replaces it with a very imperative and side-effect heavy API. In that case, just use the DOM directly. incremental-dom still solves the declarative DOM problem. You express exactly what DOM you want in a template that compiles to incremental-dom calls. It's just a more efficient way to do what React does, skipping the intermediate representation. Why does it matter if the incremental-dom calls have side effects, if the end result (of an updated DOM) is the same? If you use the DOM directly as you suggest, you end up writing a lot of manual state transitions, and probably bugs from not covering and testing absolutely every transition. incremental-dom doesn't have that problem because it's updating the whole tree for you, just like React.