[vjeux]

The problem with those small benchmarks is that it's pretty easy to manually write the optimal sequence of DOM commands to get the best performance. But when you scale your front-end to millions of lines of codes with many full time engineers that may not know front-end very well, then it becomes extremely hard to do it properly.

React originally was designed for developer efficiency and not performance. It is a port of XHP (in PHP) that we use at Facebook to build the entire front-end and we're really happy with. It turns out that the virtual dom and diff algorithms have good properties in term of performance at scale. If you have ideas in how we can communicate it better, please let me know :)