brunhild

experimental compressive Rust virtual DOM library

Brunhild aims to provide a minimalistic fast virtual DOM implementation for use as is or for building higher level (for example, view-based) libraries and frameworks.

Brunhild's core principle is reduction of allocations and indirection by internally converting string values to integers, that reference a value in either a static lookup table of common HTML strings or dynamically populated global table. This enables most value comparisons and building of element Node trees to be done much more cheaply.

Brunhild is mostly referenceless in relation to the DOM. Many virtual DOM libraries create one to one Node <-> DOM Element mappings on Node construction. Brunhild only performs this, when a DOM Element mutation is required. This allows to cheaply patch in large subtree changes as HTML strings, reducing FFI overhead. This is achieved by setting DOM Element IDs and storing those efficiently as integers on the Node. As a result brunhild does not support setting the ID attribute by the library user. Please use classes instead for such purposes.