These examples are cool but I think it’s important to note that none of them show components whose props can change over time, since that ability doesn’t seem to be modeled at all. Clever if you don’t need that but I’m having trouble seeing how it would scale to more complex apps.
The technique I used here and in all my browser-side code is the exact same technique used by VS Code internally, and it scales very well. The only difference in my code is it's more concise than writing 10 lines to construct and setup a DOM element the typical way.
Honestly, the real interesting part about my framework is literally everything else. Returning strings from JSX on the ssg-side; being able to import raw source directories and manipulate string|Buffer at ssg-time; the extremely efficient and lightning fast module system I wrote on top of chokidar and swc; probably more I'm forgetting, but basically the JSX-as-DOM is only the most visually interesting part. But really just a party trick.
[edit] Case in point: the source code to vanillajsx.com is extremely concise and clear and short, I literally wrote the whole thing today with zero deps (besides imlib), and the JSX-as-DOM demos are the least innovative part of it: https://github.com/sdegutis/vanillajsx.com/tree/main/site
I just added a more complex todo app to the bottom of the page. So it should give an idea of how a more complex hierarchy can respond to events elsewhere in the hierarchy and update themselves and each other accordingly.
Yup, in order to scale this approach to any real size (and still have confidence that everything is working together like you expect), a proper reactivity solution is needed.
For those that appreciate this approach of JSX returning concrete DOM elements, Solid works exactly like this, with the addition of a proper reactivity layer.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would this prevent you from using setTimeout/setInterval? But I agree that these projects often work great in small use cases, but quickly crumble under "real world" scenarios.
I'd be hesitant to run something like a 30fps render loop in a web app. Its been years since I last saw or tried that in a real world app but it didn't end well for performance.
Your best bet would be to queue up specific UI changes that need to be made as diff's rather than checking the entire UI state. At that point, though, you might as well run them immediately as the change is needed.
If that was still a perf problem you would end up chasing a very complex solution like react fiber to partially update the UI on a loop while periodically pausing for user events.
Sure, if you blow away the entire app on every state change. But that would lose not only state defined in components (like `i` in ClickMe) but also all state implicitly stored in DOM elements (selection, focus, scroll position, input value, media playback).
I would almost certainly never implement a UI as a render loop, but if you wanted to go down that path requestAnimationFrame is a much more idiomatic way to do it if you want to match the user's display refresh rate.
I'm by no means an advocate of this library, and never plan to use it, but to support component props that trigger rerenders, a'la React/Vue, I would use JS Proxies here. Wouldn't be that hard to implement.
