> had the mistaken belief that this was peak performance for a hand-rolled WebGL codebase
I totally agree on this.
> assuming you aren't doing anything weird like blocking on layout in one of them.
An assumption that react cannot make.
React's core promise is to make app developers lives easy, not to be performant. Performance is atrocious on the web in general, yet here it is as (one of?) the most dominant app development platforms.
With that easiness what you get is plenty of horrible (from a performance perspective) applications that get their jobs done. Some even very elegantly on many other metrics.
> Let's aim for frameworks that are in the ballpark of peak raw performance
That is a nice aim, but performance can be traded for other things. Immutable data structures will never be as performant as mutable ones, yet plenty of people make the conscious decision of using the former.
I see React's approach similary. I've built plenty of web applications in my life, and very rarely did (non-network) performance become a significant issue. As you said, computers are so powerful nowadays that most people (even devs!) cannot even comprehend it at an intuitive level.
It is always the app's logic, changing business requirements, etc. that bite me in the ass. I want tools that make that part easier. React is definitely one of those tools today. And if they found a way to keep the easiness while being better performance-wise then... yay!
Text editing wasn't the best example here, because it's very technically involved and much more difficult to optimize than you seem to imply. (In fact, VS Code is much faster than any of the popular Java-based IDEs.) But replace "text editing" with "instant messaging" and your point still stands.
I totally agree on this.
> assuming you aren't doing anything weird like blocking on layout in one of them.
An assumption that react cannot make.
React's core promise is to make app developers lives easy, not to be performant. Performance is atrocious on the web in general, yet here it is as (one of?) the most dominant app development platforms.
With that easiness what you get is plenty of horrible (from a performance perspective) applications that get their jobs done. Some even very elegantly on many other metrics.
> Let's aim for frameworks that are in the ballpark of peak raw performance
That is a nice aim, but performance can be traded for other things. Immutable data structures will never be as performant as mutable ones, yet plenty of people make the conscious decision of using the former.
I see React's approach similary. I've built plenty of web applications in my life, and very rarely did (non-network) performance become a significant issue. As you said, computers are so powerful nowadays that most people (even devs!) cannot even comprehend it at an intuitive level.
It is always the app's logic, changing business requirements, etc. that bite me in the ass. I want tools that make that part easier. React is definitely one of those tools today. And if they found a way to keep the easiness while being better performance-wise then... yay!