What I think this article does very well is rebut the myth that the DOM is slow. The DOM is not slow -- on the contrary, it is very fast. What is slow is browse

What I think this article does very well is rebut the myth that the DOM is slow. The DOM is not slow -- on the contrary, it is very fast. What is slow is browser reflow, page refreshes, display calculations, etc. In web app development of yesteryear, browser reflow was typically triggered by poorly conceived manual DOM manipulations -- which gave birth to the myth that the DOM itself is slow. Implementing a virtual DOM and VDOM diffing is just one way to manipulate the DOM more efficiently and intelligently. At my work, we've chosen a different path without the overhead and leaky abstraction of a virtual DOM. We built our own component-based SPA framework and recently open sourced it ( https://github.com/ElliotNB/nimbly https://github.com/ElliotNB/nimbly ). Each component must have a definition of what state mutations should trigger what portions of the component DOM (via CSS selectors) to refresh. There's no extra overhead for a VDOM and VDOM diffing at all. The only overhead is accrued ahead of time by the developers who must write a definition of how their component should update in response to state changes. When state does change, the framework bundles up the queued DOM changes between all components on the page, identifies/eliminates any redundant changes and refreshes the DOM in one go.