An incremental death
Incremental DOM, at least in its current incarnation, is dead. There’s no active development, the most recent changes are waiting for a release and unanswered questions starts to pile up in the issue tracker. Seems that users already understood that and are moving on.
Given the dynamics of web frontend landscape, where projects come and go at will, this fact should not be considered a surprise or, even, as something bad. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of a position from the maintainers clearly defining the plans, or lack of, for the project.
I can see some reasons leading for this fate:
- Technical limits of the architecture
- Low adoption by developer community
- Lack of interest by maintainers
From the last two there’s not much to say, just accept as facts. On the other hand i think is worth to expand on the, supposedly, Incremental DOM technical limits.
In its announce, it was said that Incremental DOM would get better performance than traditional virtual DOM implementations, especially on memory constrained mobile devices, by allocating less memory.
The expected performance did not realized in real world scenarios? The memory constraint issue showed as not important at all? Advances in Javascript engines favored virtual DOM implementations?
Understanding the technical challenges faced in Incremental DOM development would help in eventual new attempts in this field.
