[dgellow]

You might get some answers here, from an SO comment written by virtual-dom’s author: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21109361/why-is-reacts-c...

The link has been posted in another comment too, here are some chunks that may be relevant to you:

> A virtual DOM is nice because it lets us write our code as if we were re-rendering the entire scene. Behind the scenes we want to compute a patch operation that updates the DOM to look how we expect. So while the virtual DOM diff/patch algorithm is probably not the optimal solution, it gives us a very nice way to express our applications. We just declare exactly what we want and React/virtual-dom will work out how to make your scene look like this. We don't have to do manual DOM manipulation or get confused about previous DOM state. We don't have to re-render the entire scene either, which could be much less efficient than patching it.