Yeah it is an interesting one. There is definitely a slowdown due to the amount of wrapping that happens. These sort of libraries tend to put component in component in component etc.. so there is a lot of prop iteration, Object.keys calls in Object.keys calls etc which when used with proxies can add up a bit.
The tricky part is no one actually knows how slow these libraries are in say React. My suspicion they are slow there as well but maybe not as stark of a difference because of how fast Solid to begin with comparatively.
People who use Solid tend to measure stuff like this where as those who use React might have already reconciled themselves to performance issues.
React doesn't win speed races, but the mentioned slow-downs are rather extreme and would be noticeable.
I agree that one should benchmark against React-MUI as the baseline. In fact, that would give Solidjs a meaningful (less synthetic) benchmark, as in this case we have a wide range of non-trivial one-for-one components to compare with. A goldmine for performance testing.
If SolidJS could outperform React in these kind of workloads you would have a great proposition.
Thank you for correcting this. I was going to come and respond when I saw this earlier but hadn't had a chance. Yes the annoying part is not being able to destructure but you definitely don't have to (and it isn't our recommendation) to pass accessor functions down as props. I wrote an article on our perspective here:
https://dev.to/this-is-learning/thinking-locally-with-signal...
To be fair by that metric Vue has the fastest now with its core built with Alien Signals. Raw reactivity benchmarks don't actually show very much because these systems are so fast that the quickest to the slowest reactive library doesn't even make a dent on a test that says render the DOM.
And I say this as a benchmark enthusiast (and as that benchmark actually was crated by Milo from the SolidJS core team as part of our 2.0 research)
It isn't necessary. Solid has a similar custom renderer, with Pixi, three.js, terminal, etc... integrations. Solid is actually used a lot in embedded applications since it is low memory and performant. It powers Comcast's TV application applications like Peacock.
I'm curious which part of laziness are you concerned with? Is it delayed execution in events? It is just most lazy things run almost immediately during creation anyway, and on update everything is scheduled anyway. The only lazy thing we are looking at is memo's which while impactful isn't that different as the creation code runs.
I guess the push/pull propagation is harder to follow on update then simple multi queue but in complex cases we'd have a bunch of queue recursion that wasn't simple either.
Wow, I never imagined you would respond to my comment, a little embarrassed ngl :D
I understand that under the hood Solid's reactive system is not quite simple; though, the mental model needed to use it, is very simple, which I greatly appreciate when building complex application logic on top of it. That's really my main concern: that one-way "push" semantics are easy to follow and think about, and adding new mechanics complicates that picture. It seems deceptive that what presents itself, at least conceptually, as just a value access, might now cause arbitrary code execution (another way of putting this is that it feels like it violates the principle of least astonishment).
As I mentioned before, I also haven't run into situations in practice where lazy memos seem like a desirable behavior. If I initialize a derived value, it's because I plan to use it. If some computation needs to be "delayed", I place it inside an if statement with a reactive condition, for instance, createMemo(() => shouldCompute() ? computeValue() : undefined).
All that's said, you've done a fantastic job with Solid. I hope you continue to innovate and prove my objections misguided.
I'll admit that hearing that "laziness" was something being explored for Solid 2.0 also made me uneasy. Like the OP, in my case I know it's because I'm worried that it will complicate working with Solid state in the same way that React's "concurrent mode" complicates working with React state. Really, I just hate React's "concurrent mode" and I really like the simplicity of working with Solidjs' state by comparison (if Solidjs has a similar concept to concurrent mode I haven't run into it yet).
All of this is to say that my own worries aren't based on any concrete objections, but a general fear of change since I like the current approach (and haven't run into any performance issues with it). Also, without knowing exactly what you plan on changing, the idea of introducing "laziness" seams like it could be a euphemism for "async" which feels like it would definitely make things more complex. Anyway, reading your comment makes me hopeful that my ambiguous unease is misplaced.
Ironically, mechanically Vue and Svelte historically were much closer to React. Vue has a similar VDOM and Svelte while compiled still had a rerun component model.
It was only the past year about 6 years after Solid showed the way Svelte 5, and Vue Vapor got away from that and now compile down to what more or less Solid has been doing all along.
Of course this is under the surface. But in many ways while Solid itself has stayed relatively small it has profoundly impacted the rest of the ecosystem in a way we haven't seen since React. From Vue, Svelte, to Angular, Preact, and Qwik all using Signals now. The average user of these frameworks probably has no idea but everyday all the non-React frameworks work more and more like Solid.
I love Svelte, but you are absolutely right about Solid's influence. Svelte's Signals implementation seems very performant compared to other Signals-based frameworks. [0]
I wonder how long by comparison you would have had to wait for React to fix a bug of that nature. Obviously no comparison on maturity given difference of user base size, especially 3 years ago. I appreciate you sharing as I think stories like that are good example of responsiveness of the project.
Low Commit count suggests nothing other than maybe lower traffic. I've been able to keep issues the main repo under 50 issues most of its life. I admit work towards the next major version has let this slip upwards. Also effort is split among multiple repos. Repos where I'm far from the biggest contributor. The core is small and manageable. Which is a good place to be 9 years in (7 of those open to the public).
So excited for this. SSR with Astro is a gamechanger which opens up its usage to so many different avenues. Great strides with framework interop too. Named Slots really closing the gaps.
And of course any framework where SolidJS can shine so bright is going to be the top of my list.
People who use Solid tend to measure stuff like this where as those who use React might have already reconciled themselves to performance issues.