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Comment by crabmusket | Hacker News Reader

I never want to go back to a non-declarative rendering framework.

Does anyone remember a blog post from maybe 2016-ish which described the process of "building your own" react-like rendering loop? I remember it being a fantastic explanation of what the virtual dom is and does, and why the "UI is a function of state" paradigm is great. I remember it having a live example to the right side, with prose and code on the left. I can't for the life of me find it now :(

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To be fair it predates 2016 when the term “immediate mode ui” was “invented”. uis as a function of state were and still are the norm on game development. React introduced this concept on top of “retained mode ui” which is the dom. Never want to go back too despite people spreading so much hate which is not in the library itself I think but on the ecosystem. Maybe react become synonymous of too many companion libraries/bloated frameworks?

This? https://pomb.us/build-your-own-react/

Sadly not. I did find this article too while searching for what I remember. It is a close match in so many ways, but also not quite.

I remember the article very much taking the approach that you've never heard of React before, and walking through a series of problems and discoveries like "oh, what if we just render the state to the DOM every frame? let's see how that works".

Almost like a "you could have invented React" kind of vibe. I think there was a button-counter demo app.

Not a live preview and not a button-counter demo at the end, but the overall structure and the whole O(n) vs O(n^2) argumentation was in this blog post from a now defunct domain. Maybe this is what you were looking for:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150414080539/http://hackflow.c...

This definitely looks different, and I don't recall seeing this before. But this is a great post! It communicates some of the very important ideas in a straightforward way. Thanks!

Are you maybe thinking of this classic post?

- https://archive.jlongster.com/Removing-User-Interface-Comple...

Another one that seems so close that it makes me think I imagined the one I'm looking for, and this is actually what I read. Thanks for trying - it's not causing me to say eureka! but it is close.

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