State-Based vs Signal-Based Rendering

Compare: "import a specific lightweight library and wire together as needed" vs "write the whole app in terms of a bloated framework".

I've been out of the frontend game for a while, but what does react give you that knockout and maybe some url management logic do not?

I guess components are supposed to standardize modularity, so you can easily import some random widget?

  function MySubComponent({ disabled }: { disabled: Signal<boolean> }) {
    // ...
  }  

  function MyComponent({ disabled }: { disabled: Signal<boolean> }) {
    return <MySubComponent disabled={disabled} />
  }

Where signals offer an important benefit is in localizing re-rendering. If you use context with regular, non-signal values the entire VDOM tree has to be re-rendered when the context value changes (because there's no way to know what code depends on its value). With signals you can change the value of a signal in the context without changing the context itself, meaning that the only part of the VDOM tree that gets re-rendered is the one using the signal.

With performance considerations out of the way context becomes a really interesting way to provide component composition without having to specify the same props over and over as you make your way down a chain.

That consideration is orthogonal to what the useful data is. It could be a signal, or not. In other words, signals are not an alternative to context.

Too small. Imagine if you have a 2GB mutable file. Each keystroke in the middle of the file has to move the whole 2nd gigabyte backward.

    event.listenTo(render);
    event.emit();

    property.listenTo(render);
    property.set([property.get()[0]]);

  Vue can be used without Node.

Funnily enough, back when storage was slow enough that saving a text document involved a progress bar, one of the big advantages Word had over competitors was lightning fast saves, which they accomplished by switching to an immutable data structure. That is, while others would update and save the data, Word would leave it untouched and just append a patch, skipping lots of time spent rewriting things that an in-place edit would shift.

The “copy everything” mental model of immutable programming is really about as wrong as a “rewrite everything” mental model of mutable programming. If it happens it’s bad code or a degenerate case, not the way it’s supposed to happen or usually happens. Correctly anticipating performance requires getting into a lot more detail.

  > Also I don't like that React requires installing Node and compilation tools, this is a waste of time when making a quick prototype. Vue can be used without Node.

[1] https://react.dev/learn/installation#try-react

By default, usestate causes unnecessary rerenders which signals avoid (all automatically).

It isn't, given that React requires you to provide an array of dependencies when using useMemo and useEffect. The point of React is to automatically update the DOM when a virtual DOM tree gets modified.

I'm sure some 80 year olds before us thought the same of us using that term.

I wonder some years down the future, if there will be no need for JS frameworks since a lot of what they offer will be integrated into JS itself.

https://github.com/proposal-signals/signal-polyfill