When I first started building signal-kernel, I thought I was simply writing a signal library—a fine-grained reactive system not tied to any specific UI framework. On the surface, it had all the basic building blocks you would expect from a signal library:
Core primitives: Signal, Computed, and Effect
Mechanisms: dependency tracking and scheduling
Extensions: async resources and framework adapters
It could build a reactive graph, track dependencies, update derived state precisely when data changed, and bridge the result into React or Vue. But the deeper I dug into the implementation, the more I realized the real problem wasn't about building another signal library. The core question was actually this:
