I have read that Polymer has web components; does it also have a Virtual DOM that does the diffs with the DOM, or does it directly render to the DOM? Also, I’m curious to know, which is better as far as performance is considered?
P.S. never think about micromicroperfomance until you have a billion business with global infrastracture and 10+ years of history. You WILL NOT HAVE any problems in DOM perfomance without using a React.
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
Polymer is based on Web Components, which are an upcoming Standard. Web Component performance might depend on the use case, but personally I think (without testing it) that native stuff is usually really fast. As far as I know, Web Components render directly to the DOM, as they are just HTML.
Now for the interesting part: How does Polymer fare against React? The answer: You cannot compare them. They solve different problems. Facebook states that in their docs:
So it is really not against each other, but a completely different focus and they can be used together in one project, depending on your needs!