How reconciliation works
Most of the time, React is fast enough by default, and you do not need to do anything more to improve the performance of your application. React utilizes different techniques to optimize the rendering of the components on the screen.
When React must display a component, it calls its render
method and the render
methods of its children recursively. The render
method of a component returns a tree of React elements, which React uses to decide which DOM operations must be done to update the UI.
Whenever the component state changes, React calls the render
method on the nodes again, and it compares the result with the previous tree of React elements. The library is smart enough to figure out the minimum set of operations required to apply the expected changes on the screen. This process is called reconciliation, and it is managed transparently by React. Thanks to that, we can easily describe how our components must look at a given point in time in a declarative...