As you can see from inspecting the examples, any non-standard tag will use standard tags in the dom, with a class denoting their imba type.
49 karma · joined August 4, 2015
I fully stand behind the benchmark, and would even go as far as saying that it is more relevant for real world applications than benchmarks like dbmonster where everything in the view updates on every render. This effectively tries to calculate how quickly each contestant can reconcile the whole view (synchronously), but when only parts of the view has actually changed.
Here is some additional discussion about the benchmark: https://github.com/somebee/imba/issues/9
You are absolutely right, and I agree. When you use static tag trees in Imba (with inline caching) the code is not readable. If you only use it for regular things you would write in js (classes, functions, etc) I still think it is quite readable.
BTW, I really love the simplicity of Mithril. It is a very impressive project.
UPDATE: Since the performance was just as good with this dumber type of caching I have changed the actual benchmark to work this way. Would you still consider that caching sneaky? If so, I'm not sure what to say. Yes, Imba caches dom nodes for reuse. That is the whole philosophy behind its 'virtual dom'. Now it does not 'leak memory' anymore either, even though this 'leak' is a feature (ref comment about manual pruning) and not a bug.
I'm really glad to hear that it is still faster even when removing caching. That, to me, is quite insane. But if you wrote a TodoMVC app in Imba, you would do it _exactly_ like the one that is benchmarked. We have even considered adding asserts to warn users if they use uncached nodes in rendering that happens very frequently.
You are actually right that Imba does not dereference these automatically (see other comment re purging by judofyr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10092454). We could dereference unused tags once every second or so, but for now we think it is better to have manual control of this. Again, how much is usually happening during a render-cycle? Basically nothing. This benchmark is trying to look at how expensive it is to rerender the whole view. Maybe I should make the "Unchanged render" benchmark the main attraction (as it is the most important) -- but it is quite boring to look at.
This is utterly wrong, and if you had cared to read about what the benchmark is trying to achieve, you would understand (https://github.com/somebee/todomvc-render-benchmark).
You cannot simply remove caching and reusing nodes from the benchmark (which you do with that change). This is the way Imba does diffing, and it would be akin to removing the React virtual dom!
As we mention in the readme: "Even though it looks incredibly boring, the "Unchanged Render" is possibly the most interesting benchmark. All of these frameworks are plenty fast if they only render whenever something has changed. But if the frameworks are fast enough to render the whole app in 0.01ms, you could skip thinking about all sorts of tracking to keep the view in sync."
In a real world app you do not create 1000000 todos. The actual data rarely change that much. As for purging the cache, see comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10092454. Quote:
One thing to be aware of is that Imba doesn't automatically remove the cache for you, because we've found that it's tricky to determine when you actually want to purge it. For instance: if mouseOver <something> else <something-else> Just because `mouseOver` becomes true for one frame doesn't mean you want the `<something-else>`-tag to be purged from the cached and removed. Keeping it around is nice for performance and convenience (e.g. state, jQuery plugins). In practice it turns out you want to purge whole pages/sections at the same time, which is way friendlier for the garbage collector as well.
If you _really_ want to not cache things this way, you can change the line to:
res.push((this['_' + i] = this['_' + i] || t$('todo')).se ...
class A
var i = 10
var i = 20
function A(){ };
var i1 = 10;
var i = 20;