Who performs better, virtual DOM or native JS?

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Type: comprehensive question, open question

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A:

Working with native JS performs better for the following reasons:

Because it’s a step further from manipulating native JS, the virtual DOM needs to find the difference before and after the page has been updated, and it still needs to manipulate native JS when the page has been modified.

Suppose the performance cost of modifying page elements is defined as A, and the performance cost of finding differences in page elements is defined as B

• The performance cost of manipulating the virtual DOM is A + B
• Modifying page elements directly has A performance cost of A

A + B > A, obviously using native JS is better than the virtual DOM.

Consider an example of a div whose text is ‘hello’ :

<div id='app'>hello</div>
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Now you need to change the text content of the div to ‘hello1’, which you can do with native JS.

const div = document.getElementById('app')
div.textContent = 'hello1'
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Is there a better way to do this than with the code above? The answer is, no, and that’s the simplest, best-performing way to do it.

If I use Vue to implement this function:

<template>
  <div> hello </div>
</template>Instead of<template>
  <div> hello1 </div>
</template>
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What looks like a one-character difference is actually doing a lot of things inside Vue, such as parsing template strings, creating a virtual DOM, comparing with diff algorithms, and so on, which is a performance loss.

So why do people say that virtual DOM performance is better than native JS?

That’s because when many people refer to manipulating the DOM with native JS, they mean using native JS incorrectly, such as:

• Update only a few elements, but destroy all the old nodes and create all the new ones.
• Replace the node with innerHTML.

Remember this conclusion: it’s not that native JS is bad, it’s that native JS is the best, it’s that native JS is not performing well.

Using innerHTML as an example, let’s take a closer look at why using the virtual DOM performs better than using poorly manipulated native JS.

<ul id="list"></ul>
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const htmlStr = ` 
item1
 
item2
 
item3
 
item4
 `

const ul = document.getElementById('list')
ul.innerHTML = htmlStr
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As shown in the code above, the element is created by assigning an HTML string to it.

Because the innerHTML can only be reset with an assignment, if you need to change an element, such as changing item1 above to Item11, or even just one character, you need to destroy all the old DOM elements and create a new DOM element entirely.

Here is a concept to understand: the computation performance of the JS layer is much better than that of the DOM layer. The test code and results are as follows:

console.time('js')
const arr = []
for(let i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
  const div = {
    tag: 'div'
  }
  arr.push(div)
}
console.timeEnd('js')

console.time('dom')
const element = document.getElementById('element')
for(let i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
  const div = document.createElement('div')
  element.appendChild(div)
}
console.timeEnd('dom')
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With that in mind, we use a table to compare the performance of the virtual DOM and innerHTML when updated:

Using the virtual DOM, there will be a performance loss of diff algorithm at the JS level. However, it is only JS level calculation after all, and will not take too much time.

At the DOM level, however, the virtual DOM only updates the changed DOM, whereas the innerHTML needs to be fully updated, and the performance benefits of the virtual DOM come into play.

And with the virtual DOM, no matter how big the page is, only the changed content is updated, whereas with innerHTML, the larger the page, the greater the performance cost.

As a result, the performance of a poorly handled native JS is much lower than that of a virtual DOM.

At the end

To sum up, using the virtual DOM is far superior to using native JS in terms of maintainability and mental burden, and far superior to poorly handled native JS in terms of performance.

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This article refers to: vue.js design and implementation

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