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Comment by blablabla123 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how well the event binding works. For me this is the main reason to use React because it avoids all the mess that can come from that. Apart from that, React performance is much better than any naive re-rendering solution, on the other hand it's worse than programmatic diffing with native APIs or jQuery...

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In what way would you say the event binding here differs from React's? (Genuinely interested).

The main difference from where I'm sitting is that React has a concept of "Component state" - updates to which trigger local redraws. Here you have to manually call:

  renderNoughts()

any time you change state, this rerenders the whole mount point.

If I'm honest, React's state stuff has always seemed a little strange to me Would love people to try explain the point to me, is it just a performance related enhancement?

React's state stuff is just a really basic, batteries-included solution that works for basic things but doesn't really scale. There's nothing special about it in terms of performance. Once you get beyond a certain level of complexity in your app, and need to bring in richer state management, React's mechanisms become dead weight.

The one exception being contexts. Contexts allow you to hook into react's virtual DOM and "talk about" a subtree of it instead of just the very next layer down. This is something that an external library can't replicate, so it's more of a fundamental primitive than setState and hooks are.

I've never deep-dived into that but it's possible to declare components as pure. In that case, as least in theory, React is able to only perform the absolute minimum amount of operations. [1] On the other hand, about binding, the worst-case scenario is that after an update onclick handlers stop working or memory leaks start emerging. It's easy to run into these problems when working for instance with older Frameworks like Backbone.js, which register click handlers procedurally but don't manage the bindings - automatically - during the whole life cycle. Also I've observed such problems with one of the minimalistic React clones, I think it was Preact or Inferno.

[1] https://medium.com/@esamatti/react-js-pure-render-performanc...

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