domdiff VS uhtml

> There are lighter-weight shadow dom frameworks out there (than Vue/React/Angular) so why would you want to write one yourself?

You can even avoid a shadow DOM entirely:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml

If by faster you mean faster than React I think there is evidence it can be. The author of the issue writes lots of dom utility and rendering libraries and I believe domdiff is more or less what he describes in the post:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

You can find it placed way above React in the usual JS rendering benchmarks:

https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/master/we...

Now it's not entirely clear whether these benchmarks convey something meaningful except for maybe the point that most frameworks are quite fast. That being said I think it's developer experience that really stands to improve. Thinking of view as a pure function of state was a great innovation, but existing implementations can end up fracturing the view into virtual doms and non-virtual. Then you end up with problems like D3 and React not coexisting.

I feel like I heard something from the lit-html folks that a long term aspiration was to integrate some learnings from the project into chrome, but I haven't been able to find where again.

There has been a trend in JS with libraries becoming idiomatic to the language to later have the issues they targeted be addressed natively (a la JQuery).

In general, I definitely appreciate your point about adding complexity to the platform, but I think when it comes to web technologies that ship has long sailed. I really see it as an opportunity to bring a lot of simplicity, chiefly filling that void that's birthed a billion JS frameworks.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

I have to say that I am an extremist minimalist, so I use a nano-framework I developed for the frontend, with uhtml (https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml) and some JavaScript libraries to help.

One of the main decisions I had to make early on was template handling, there are many approaches out there and of course, with React being the king, I first tried implementing a VirtualDOM complete with JSX support and whatnot... well that didn't really worked for what I was trying to achieve, so I moved into Tagged Template Literals (through µhtml) and tried to stick to standards as much as possible by building on top of the Custom Elements API.

FAST rendering thanks to µhtml

Challenge: With declarative rendering, oftentimes entire DOM trees are re-painted because of simple prop or state changes that could have been handled faster by imperative DOM manipulation. I wanted a framework that, like Lit, only updated content or attributes that had changed instead of re-painting entire DOM elements and trees. Solution: I chose µhtml for the default templating system because it accomplishes this goal and other advanced templating features in a tiny bundle size. To make rendering even faster and smoother, I throttled uhtml's rendering using requestAnimationFrame.

> There are lighter-weight shadow dom frameworks out there (than Vue/React/Angular) so why would you want to write one yourself?

You can even avoid a shadow DOM entirely:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml

My next goal would be to discard snabbdom (and virtualdom) and use custom elements. For that I'm evaluating a library like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml and all it's ecosystem of utility

Yep ditched React since 2015, it's still the same mess today. They all not trying to encourage interoperability, and comes with their own build .. seriously? Frontend should be just libs! Use https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml or lit-html where things should be highly dynamic.

If it's for getting into job market, go for React. If it's for learning declarative ui, build cool stuff real quick without tooling, go with lit-html or bravely go with https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml (it's more simple than anything else, yet powerful)

A tiny dom lib like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml is more than enough for very complicated UI, with understanding how events work, will be able to implement very thin state management on top. With game programming styled manual render() call here and there as needed, pretty neat.