What is difference between real DOM and virtual DOM?
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Difference between Virtual DOM and Real DOM.
Real DOM | Virtual DOM |
---|---|
There is too much memory wastage | No memory wastage |
It updates Slow | It updates fast |
It can directly update HTML | It can't update HTML directly |
Pros and Cons of Virtual DOM
Not only that, below are some advantages of the Virtual DOM: Speed and performance boost. Lightweight. It is simple and clear. Amazing diffing algorithm.
In summary, Virtual DOM in React solves the issue with updating unnecessary objects. When you try to update the DOM in react, the virtual DOM gets compared to what it looked like before you updated it, and React figures out which objects have changed. Then the changed objects get updated on real DOM.
In simple terms, it is a structured representation of the HTML elements that are present in a webpage or web-app. DOM represents the entire UI of your application. The DOM is represented as a tree data structure. It contains a node for each UI element present in the web document.
What is the Virtual DOM? The virtual DOM (VDOM) is a programming concept where an ideal, or “virtual”, representation of a UI is kept in memory and synced with the “real” DOM by a library such as ReactDOM. This process is called reconciliation.
A virtual DOM is a lightweight JavaScript representation of the Document Object Model (DOM) used in declarative web frameworks such as React, Vue. js, and Elm. Updating the virtual DOM is comparatively faster than updating the actual DOM (via JavaScript).
But later, when we make updates, Virtual DOM will go through steps 1–3. It will compare the new render tree with the previous one, and do steps 4–5 only for the modified nodes. That's what makes it so fast! It doesn't need to do a whole process from the scratch.
When we render an application user interface, React creates a virtual DOM tree representing that UI and keeps it in memory. On the next update — in other words, when the data that renders the app changes — React will automatically create a new virtual DOM tree for the update.
The virtual DOM is also tree-like structure, kept in memory, that stores the elements of a page, but it comes with the benefit that performing any work on is cheaper and faster, compared to its counterpart.
In short, the shadow DOM is a browser technology whose main objective is to provide encapsulation when creating elements. On the other hand, the virtual DOM is managed by JavaScript libraries—e.g., React—and it's mostly a strategy to optimize performance.
How does the virtual DOM improve user experience?
React uses virtual DOM to enhance its performance. It uses the observable to detect state and prop changes. React uses an efficient diff algorithm to compare the versions of virtual DOM. It then makes sure that batched updates are sent to the real DOM for repainting or re-rendering of the UI.
React uses virtual DOM which is a lightweight version of the DOM. The only difference is the ability to write the screen like the real DOM, in fact, a new virtual DOM is created after every re-render. DOM stores the components of a website in a tree structure.

Virtual DOM is a partial or full copy of the browser DOM tree structure. It is created by the frameworks like React and kept in the memory for manipulations via app code. As and when necessary, virtual DOM is used by the app code to update the browser DOM – the DOM that actually represents the user interface.
When a web page is loaded, the browser first reads the HTML text and constructs DOM Tree from it. Then it processes the CSS whether that is inline, embedded, or external CSS and constructs the CSSOM Tree from it. After these trees are constructed, then it constructs the Render-Tree from it.
React uses virtual DOM to enhance its performance. It uses the observable to detect state and prop changes. React uses an efficient diff algorithm to compare the versions of virtual DOM.
The Virtual DOM is a light-weight abstraction of the DOM. You can think of it as a copy of the DOM, that can be updated without affecting the actual DOM. It has all the same properties as the real DOM object, but doesn't have the ability to write to the screen like the real DOM.
Browsers can't read JSX because there is no inherent implementation for the browser engines to read and understand them. JSX is not intended to be implemented by the engines or browsers, it is intended to be used by various transpilers to transform these JSX into valid JavaScript code.
Both are stored in RAM. And both are stored in the Heap. However, DOMs are more complicated than a simple image. Here the DOM is represented as a tree, both abstractly, and in RAM.
- Create hyperscript function to render DOM — it is kinda JSX.
- Create simple app with hyperscript.
- Make our App dynamic and learn to render virtual DOM.
- Implement diffing algorithm to see the power of virtual DOM.
First of all - the Virtual DOM was not invented by React, but React uses it and provides it for free. The Virtual DOM is an abstraction of the HTML DOM. It is lightweight and detached from the browser-specific implementation details.
Why do we need shadow Dom?
Shadow DOM allows hidden DOM trees to be attached to elements in the regular DOM tree — this shadow DOM tree starts with a shadow root, underneath which you can attach any element, in the same way as the normal DOM.
At any given time, ReactJS maintains two virtual DOM, one with the updated state Virtual DOM and other with the previous state Virtual DOM.
A virtual DOM object has the same properties as a real DOM object, but it lacks the real thing's power to directly change what's on the screen. Manipulating the DOM is slow. Manipulating the virtual DOM is much faster, because nothing gets drawn onscreen.
The answer is no. The Virtual DOM is a tree of JavaScript objects that represent the real DOM elements. The Shadow DOM is a form of encapsulation on our elements. Think about using the <video> tag in your browser.
A ReactElement is a light, stateless, immutable, virtual representation of a DOM Element . It is a virtual DOM. ReactDOM.
Dom manipulation may be important in some applications, but in most applications there is some transfer of data from the back end to the front end. As a front end engineer, it is your job to display that data in a way that makes sense to your end users.
Now coming to the HTML DOM methods, there are six different methods in which users can access or manipulate HTML elements using JavaScript: HTML DOM getElementById() Method.
The DOM (Document Object Model) is a Tree representation of the page, starting from the <html> tag, going down into every child, which are called nodes. It's kept in the browser memory, and directly linked to what you see in a page.
You will notice that parent nodes in the DOM have more than two children, and that means that the DOM is not a binary tree or binary search tree (or BST as I'm seeing it abbreviated here and there).
Real/Browser DOM:
It is a structured representation of HTML in the webpage or application. It represents the entire UI(User Interface) of the web application as the tree data structure. It is a structural representation of HTML elements of a web application in simple words.
Why React uses virtual DOM instead of real DOM?
React uses the virtual DOM as a strategy to compute minimal DOM operations when re-rendering the UI. It is not in rivalry with or faster than the DOM! The virtual DOM provides a mechanism that abstracts manual DOM manipulations away from the developer, helping us write more predictable code.
A virtual DOM object has the same properties as a real DOM object, but it lacks the real thing's power to directly change what's on the screen. Manipulating the DOM is slow. Manipulating the virtual DOM is much faster, because nothing gets drawn onscreen.