ReactiveConf 2017 - Tom Dale: Secrets of the Glimmer VM

…und it like they intend to be not just relevant but pushing the boundaries for a long time to come. For one example this boundary pushing, you should not miss @tomdale's talk at ReactConf about GlimmerJS (the view layer extracted from EmberJS). It is, in my humble opinion, simultaneously mind-blowing and and inspiring.3 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video…

Yes, the runtime needs to be JavaScript. It’s not obviously faster, but it’s been benchmarked to be faster. link to this video You can skip to 29:34 for the performance demo.

This is a good development. Honestly one thing I very much think is a downside about React is the fact that your template is also JavaScript. Don't get me wrong this is incredibly powerful and can be very expressive, but it comes at a cost. That cost has the same cost as other JavaScript - it's blocking, cannot be paused and has all the possibilities of de-optimizations that might occur in the JIT. The Ember team faced a similar problem in the past and I find their solution to this problem quite intriguing, even in it's obscurity. Instead of compiling their templates to JavaScript they instead compile them to opcodes in a binary format which is executed by a virtual machine. This has several…