[omphalos]

What should happen is that we do incremental computation, sort of like what's described here [1]. You ought to be able to declaratively specify that such-and-such collection maps to such-and-such elements. If you change just one element in the collection, change tracking built into an incremental computation framework should cause that one element to update. Logically, there's really no need to review the entire collection if just one element changes.

Certainly the Virtual DOM is one way to let you declaratively write to the DOM and not worry about change tracking yourself. But it's not the most efficient way.

Unfortunately this sort of thing has never been implemented in JavaScript (that I can find) so currently the Virtual DOM is probably our least worst choice, at the moment.

[1] https://blogs.janestreet.com/introducing-incremental/

[amelius]

Yes, this is also the approach I was thinking about. Perhaps it is time somebody at Facebook gets the chance to develop the javascript variant of this technique, as it is a far more "correct" way of approaching the problem, from a Computer Science standpoint.