Discussion on: Building a Simple Virtual DOM from Scratch

Sure. You have stepped into the common trap of thinking recursion recursively. Your brain will stack-overflow first before the computer does haha.

The reason why you are so confused is because you are lacking the "leap of faith" for recursion. You try to figure out what is happening, then you look into the function; it calls itself, and u look into the function again... Then you are lost.

All you need is faith!

The first thing is to define what diff and diffChildren do. I made it very clear for diff.

Imagine we have a function diff (oldVTree, newVTree) which calculate the differences between the two virtual trees; return a patch($tree) function that takes in the real DOM of oldVTree and perform appropriate operations to the real DOM to make the real DOM looks like newVTree.

So the idea is, you know diff will somehow call itself again at some point. And when this happens, all you need is the "leap of faith"; believe that diff will work as you wish! Don't look into diff again to try to figure things out! Just think about what diff should do and return. By our definition, it will return a patch! So just assume the recursive calls to diff will work and read on.

Teaching recursion using this example is a bit hard, have a look at this article which I explained very clearly how you could obtain faith in recursion.

The leap of faith takes some practice to get use to it. If you want some exercise, I am happy to give you some challenge and guide you through them. Feel free to DM me on twitter: @ycmjason