The fastest virtual DOM is no virtual DOM at all.

Rather than creating and diffing a fine-grained tree of elements every render, it's very easy to use the syntactic structure of a template to see exactly what parts can and cannot change. To get stable and minimal DOM updates you just compare the template identity to the previously rendered template - if they match you update the dynamic expressions, if they don't you clear and render the new template.

This is what we did with lit-html and it's quite a bit faster (and smaller) than React and doesn't require a compiler because it uses standard JS tagged template literals. https://lit.dev/docs/libraries/standalone-templates/

It's a very simple approach and very, very hard to beat in the fast/small/simple/buildless tradeoff space. I hope one day that the DOM can include standard updatable DOM with a technique like this on top of the template instantiation proposal from Apple. It's such a common need that it should be built in.

> It's a very simple approach and very, very hard to beat in the fast/small/simple/buildless tradeoff space.

Author of the ivi library here. Completely agree with an idea that such approach could lead to a better performance, but there is a huge difference between an idea and actual implementation. Also, I just don't get it why a lot developers that work in this problem space still think like "virtual DOM" API and tagged template APIs are mutually exclusive, I've actually have an experimental implementation that supports both APIs and it is not so easy to beat efficient full diff vdom algo. Tagged template APIs are useful when we are working with mostly static HTML chunks, but when it comes to building a set of reusable components (not expensive web components), pretty much everything inside this components becomes dynamic and we are back to diffing everything.