[lukev]

It's easy to speculate that better solutions are possible, but noone has ever actually done it. React (used from a more functional language, like ClojureScript) is the closest system to the world you describe which actually exists.

And no, papers and toy proof-of-concepts don't count. They are extremely interesting, and a necessary first step, but someone needs to build something large and demonstrate effectiveness in the real world before you can make an honest bid for large-scale adoption. As far as I know, no other FRP or functional UI system has done any better than React on that front, yet.

[amelius]

True. But consider this: if we had a functional-style language that did not do any incremental computation, only the minimal React-style of re-rendering, that would already be infinitely better. Because it would mean we wouldn't have to totally rewrite our code whenever incremental computation became a reality.

In other words, we can do it in steps.