React is slow at its very core

For years, I’ve written about how React is absolutely terrible for performance.

I talk to a lot of early-career developers who believe it’s magically better for performance than vanilla JS “because it has a virtual DOM,” but that’s simply not the case. The golden rule of JavaScript: more abstractions means worse performance.

Taylor Hunt does a good deep-dive into modern React’s performance issues.

It was particularly shocking interesting to hear that, by the React core teams own admission, React has been slow form the very beginning, and they’ve just always kicked that can down the road.

So people started playing around with this internally, and everyone had the same reaction. They were like, “Okay, A.) I have no idea how this is going to be performant enough, but B.) it’s so fun to work with.” Right? Everybody was like, “This is so cool, I don’t really care if it’s too slow — somebody will make it faster.”

Friends… no one made it faster.