[joppy]

“ If you code to just the DOM - that is is where you will stay. Forever.”

Svelte native exists…

The VDOM which mirrors the document DOM is an implementation detail of React, as something sitting between the actual DOM, and the VDOM fragment returned by a React view. It’s true that if the document DOM gets fast enough, the mirroring VDOM could go away, but some diffing algorithm would still have to reconcile the document DOM with whatever fragment is returned from a view.

I think one of the realisations of Svelte is that rather than returning arbitrary runtime generated DOM fragments from views, it is better to have the view implemented by a template that a compiler can understand and manipulate at compile-time. Here we trade off some expressivity (run-time generated DOM) for the ability to do much much more at compile time - I think this is the real point that should be being made in the article.