Benchmarking Preact Signals versus the React Alternatives

With all the recent talk around Preact Signals I decided to clean up and release some benchmarks I did a while ago, and talk about the conceptual differences between the various state management systems available.

Originally this post was much longer, but I've split it into two, and I'll release the second part once it's finished soon (hopefully in a couple of days).

This was sparked by Preact Signals monkey patching the renderer in their React package. I thought that such a high maintenance cost decision surely conferred huge performance benefits, when in fact it does not! Though I don't show it in this specific benchmark (it's in the next post), it's more performant to subscribe to the signal and update a regular useState hook in the component, no monkey patching required.

I think it's helpful to see that these text updates are taking on the order of <20 microseconds on 10 year old hardware, so upending your entire state management solution in pursuit of better performance might not be a sound compromise.