Thumbing this from my phone so can't go into as much depth as normal.
1. The diff algorithm is deterministic and accepts that some widgets are stateful. You can tell the system which items to preserve and which ones to destroy by providing an identifier. This is essential complexity in the current world we live in (global dom state tied to element instances like focus). If we were to throw out the Dom spec and rebuild it we would not need to do so much.
So you can animate by tweeting a value and rerendering/diffing every frame. Facebook look back video editor works this way.
2. Yes, but delta updates are imperative mutations over time and humans are really bad at keeping track of them so we should try to isolate them as much as possible. We have a separate system that coalesces these deltas into consistent views of the world which are then passed to react. This is also the role of systems like rx.
One way to think about it is like rest. People like rest because it is predictable: URL refers to the same resource always and refreshing the page always works consistently and you never need to think about deltas.
I tend to model and see all communication (at all levels) as message passing and not as resource/state snapshot passing, but the web has worked fine with the latter concept so far. So React's architecture certainly provides value in such situations.
Totally get you on that. I think that message passing is valuable because it forces you to decouple systems in a way that reduces shared state. But for complex apps this means that you will probably have to introduce some sort of coordination system, which is where things start to get complicated. If you can pull "time" out of the equation (ie look at complete state snapshots rather than messages over time) it can make things a lot easier. Obviously not appropriate for everything, but has worked well for us when building UIs.
No problem btw, fire away if you have any more questions!
1. The diff algorithm is deterministic and accepts that some widgets are stateful. You can tell the system which items to preserve and which ones to destroy by providing an identifier. This is essential complexity in the current world we live in (global dom state tied to element instances like focus). If we were to throw out the Dom spec and rebuild it we would not need to do so much.
So you can animate by tweeting a value and rerendering/diffing every frame. Facebook look back video editor works this way.
2. Yes, but delta updates are imperative mutations over time and humans are really bad at keeping track of them so we should try to isolate them as much as possible. We have a separate system that coalesces these deltas into consistent views of the world which are then passed to react. This is also the role of systems like rx.
One way to think about it is like rest. People like rest because it is predictable: URL refers to the same resource always and refreshing the page always works consistently and you never need to think about deltas.