So what's the key difference vs React?
When it comes to VDOM, as far as I know, that's just the implementation chosen in react-dom, not something that is inherent to React.
When it comes to VDOM, as far as I know, that's just the implementation chosen in react-dom, not something that is inherent to React.
While ReactDOM is just an implementation of the VDOM, Solid uses a completely different change management approach than React which is why it's API can look like React Hooks but not be subject to the Hook Rules. Although its more the other way around in that React Hooks is influenced by fine grained libraries that have existed for over a decade now.
Historically this approach suffered greatly on initialization but precompilation of the JSX mitigates this. Which just leaves this approaches strength which is partial updates to handle the rest. In so the approach differs from a lot of previous precompiled work since the update cycle is more optimized.
EDIT: I see meant more that React itself isn't married to the VDOM. That is true-ish. It still is based on Partitioned Top Down evaluation. So even if it wasn't using a VDOM it would attack things a similar way. Solid is using fine grained evaluation through an Synchronous Reactive Programming graph. It just fundamentally works very differently on how it handles changes.