I am 100% aware of what you're talking about and the differences between what you're talking about and react. You are largely correct on the GC and non-GC dist

I am 100% aware of what you're talking about and the differences between what you're talking about and react. You are largely correct on the GC and non-GC distinction. However, even accounting for this a cheat must still occur somewhere else in the pipeline. That immutable data structure you're talking about must be fed to IO which updates the screen. This is equivalent to updating the virtual DOM. This is where the one to one correspondence forms with FRP. The "cheat" so to speak... whether a framework or an outside runtime implements it no computer system can truly implement FP and they all must cheat. You could argue that we're not talking about things at that level of abstraction but I would argue that for gaming and systems level programming, this level of abstraction is critical to the topic at hand.