[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.