What is this solving?
But isn't "performances" the point of React? As I understand things, people were moving from AngularJS to React because the virtual DOM was supposed to be the most performant technique to handle UI mutation and rendering.
So what is the reality behind the supposed speed of React ?
Got a link to the research for that?
My pet peeve is unsubstantiated bullshit claims. We let sooooo much nonsense fly, especially in JS land.
My own experience and that of the many others that created webapps pre-React and then adopted it is that its model simplifies our work and removes bugs. That's why we use it. It's also why there are a bunch of other vdom libraries and Ember and Angular have both moved toward similar one-way data flow models.
There's a lot that we do day-to-day that doesn't have research to back it up. At some point, we have to try things out for ourselves to see how they work for us.
Reminder: VirtualDOM is just an optimization of the rerender everything problem.
You write a function that takes the current model state and returns the DOM tree that should be displayed in that state. If you want to change something on the UI, you swap in a new state and the whole thing is re-rendered -- at least that's the abstraction.
It's a programming model that's easy to understand and hard to get wrong. That's the great thing about it! The bad thing about it is that if you implemented it naively, by actually re-rendering all the HTML for your single-page app on every state change, the performance would be awful.
Virtual DOM diffing is a solution to that performance problem, and it makes applications written this way perform adequately. You can't read about React without the DOM diffing being mentioned, and library authors love to compare benchmarks, so it's easy to see virtual DOM as the feature. It's just a means to an end though.
The point is to be able to (from a developer's point of view) re-render "everything", with every change, top down, without having to worry about the details. Doing that normally would be horribly slow, so React makes it adequately fast.
So it's not "super mega high speed lib". It's "Gives you the ability to have a function which, given argument, renders an entire app, and can be called over and over and over" at pragmatic speed, allowing for easier code to reason about.
If your primary goal is performance above all else, it's actually not that great a library.