[tracker1]

Like I said, could, it probably depends on actual use... DOM navigation for read or update can be optimized, but depending on how it is done may not work as well. React itself is moving towards diffing against the browsers real DOM iirc. Browsers have gotten a lot better than in the past. That said, actually comparing each node for updates against large trees may be more costly than updating and diffing against a partial abstraction.

[sraquo]

What I'm saying is outside of the virtual DOM paradigm you might not need to diff any elements at all, real or virtual, and so you wouldn't care about the performance of DOM reads, as you're not doing them.

Then it becomes a matter of DOM write performance, but that is the same for everyone assuming the native DOM API commands issued by the libraries are the same, which is a more or less reasonable assumption for well optimized libraries even if they use different paradigms to calculate what those commands should be.