ivi

> The react model - where you just update the global state and re-render everything - is slower but easier on the brain. The signals model is faster, but so much effort. there are multiple frameworks now that do fine-grained diffing without relying on signals, proxies, or any other reactive primitives. they basically have the top-down react model but much faster and without the weird concepts like hooks and manual/wasteful dependency arrays. my favorite one is ivi-js: https://github.com/localvoid/ivi it's just 8% slower than the fastest / ugliest / imperative / unmaintainable vanilla js you can eventually arrive at if all you care about is winning benchmarks. https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2025/table...

i'm personally a fan of ivi-js. it has blindingly fast perf (edges out Solid by a bit), top-down data flow, with fine-grained diffing, tagged template syntax, real closure state without rules-of-hooks weirdness and waste, super efficient mem use, and no special reactive primitives like signals/observables/proxies to get that performance, so you could use it with complex serialized/able state over wire (which is not something you can do with reactive primitives). https://github.com/localvoid/ivi

Full disclosure: I wrote a vdom library ivi[1]. Being fast is not just about micro updates, I think that most vdom authors don't care too much about micro updates performance because it isn't a bottleneck. For example, Virtual DOM with a powerful composition model can significantly reduce code size because composition gives you code reusability, and virtual dom is one of the most compact output formats to render/update DOM. 1. https://github.com/localvoid/ivi