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by localvoid 935 days ago
If anyone is interested in this topic, I would recommend to start from fundamentals, so it would provide some answers on why some "not so modern" frameworks aren't jumping on a "signals" hype-train.

- Incremental computing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_computing

- Self-Adjusting Computation (Umut A. Acar) - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/acar.pdf

- Introducing incremental (JaneStreet) - https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing-incremental/

- Incremental computation and the web (JaneStreet) - https://blog.janestreet.com/incrementality-and-the-web/

- Self Adjusting DOM (JaneStreet) - https://blog.janestreet.com/self-adjusting-dom/

- Self Adjusting DOM and Diffable Data (JaneStreet) - https://blog.janestreet.com/self-adjusting-dom-and-diffable-...

- Incremental Computation (Draft of part 1) (Rado Kirov) - https://rkirov.github.io/posts/incremental_computation/

- Incremental Computation (Draft of part 2) (Rado Kirov) - https://rkirov.github.io/posts/incremental_computation_2/

- Incremental Computation (Draft of part 3) (Rado Kirov) - https://rkirov.github.io/posts/incremental_computation_3/

- Towards a unified theory of reactive UI (Raph Levien) - https://raphlinus.github.io/ui/druid/2019/11/22/reactive-ui....

1 comments

Besides React, are any of the popular frameworks not on the signals type-train?
Vue.js is and isn't. It did ""fine grained reactivity getter setter proxy something"" before it was cool [0].

At this point I can't stop myself from pointing out that the underlying reactivity/diffing system is rarely what makes an application slow. I've heard the creator of XState and Stately [1] say that React's vdom is not fast enough for updating edges in their state chart in real time without lots of optimisations and I believe him. It's just that most people don't encounter such issues and spend adding a dozen tracking scripts that run before the actual application does.

0 - https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/reactivity-in-depth.html#conn...

1 - https://stately.ai/

I've stopped paying close attention to the web framework scene in the past couple of years, as most of the interesting ideas on this topics are usually coming from different communities. But as I understand, the majority of popular web frameworks (React, Vue3, Angular) are still using tree diffing or hybrid "signals"+tree diffing strategies.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting ideas to explore in this problem space is a hybrid solution: differential dataflow[1][2](model) + self-adjusting computations(view-model + view).

1. https://github.com/vlcn-io/materialite

2. https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-dataflow/

What does this use?

https://apprun.js.org/