[bmuon]

> I am convinced that if react really wanted to, they could make optimizations to make it really close to svelte

Facebook has been working for a while on Ahead-Of-Time compilation for React. Interestingly, it looks like they thought the problem was too complicated and they gave up:

> To address this challenge we initially experimented with one approach to ahead-of-time (AOT) optimization — Prepack — but ultimately that direction did not pan out. Specifically, we realized that many AOT optimizations don’t work because they either don’t have enough global knowledge or they have too little. For example, a component might be static in practice because it always receive a constant string from its parent, but the compiler can’t see that far and thinks the component is dynamic. Even when we could make optimizations work, we found that they were unpredictable to the developer. Without predictability it was hard for developers to rely on them.

Instead they're now experimenting with moving the virtual DOM resolution to the server and avoiding sending all the "templating" code to the client, which achieves a similar result. See https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react....