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Because when your code changes DOM, browser does not know whether you are going to stop at it for now, or do something else, so it has to re-render. In React you explicitly request application of virtual DOM changes to real DOM once you are done.



In theory they could add some new methods to the DOM api to allow for this, but it would be non-standard and currently none of the browsers have it.

Something like this maybe?

batchDomChanges(); ... dom changes here ... flushDomChanges();


Or use fastdom[1], which batches reads and writes to reduce layout thrashing.

[1]: https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom


Well I thought that is why there is requestAnimationFrame.


Great explanation.




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