Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... faster than what exactly? You have to do the virtual DOM pattern (generating new DOM state and then diffing with old state) with virtual elements. You can't compare proper virtual dom to using real DOM elements instead of virtual ones in a virtual dom pattern, it wouldn't make any sense. But there are other non-virtual-DOM ways to manage DOM state efficiently and in a maintainable manner. For example, my own…
Like I said, could , it probably depends on actual use... DOM navigation for read or update can be optimized, but depending on how it is done may not work as well. React itself is moving towards diffing against the browsers real DOM iirc. Browsers have gotten a lot better than in the past. That said, actually comparing each node for updates against large trees may be more costly than updating and diffing against a pa…
Then it becomes a matter of DOM write performance, but that is the same for everyone assuming the native DOM API commands issued by the libraries are the same, which is a more or less reasonable assumption for well optimized libraries even if they use different paradigms to calculate what those commands should be.