I've been building Farm.js, a full-stack framework with an experimental ahead-of-time compiler for React (repo on GitHub). The short version: when the compiler can prove at build time exactly which DOM nodes a piece of state touches, it skips React's render cycle entirely for that update and writes to the DOM directly. When it can't prove it, the component stays on normal React. No new mental model, no different component syntax.
You can try everything in this article without installing anything. The playground runs the real framework in your browser via WebContainers: open it on StackBlitz.
This post is a deep dive into how the compiler works, with honest benchmark numbers (including the case where it does nothing), and then a tour of the rest of the framework.
The idea
Take the most ordinary component imaginable:
