Comment by d12frosted

Good points, thanks for engaging thoughtfully.

On vui.el's approach - yes, the blessing is that widget.el is simple enough to build on. It does the "rendering" and some "behaviour", vui.el handles the rest.

On ECS vs OO - I'll admit I don't have enough experience to speak about UI paradigms in general. But my critique of widget.el is that inheritance hierarchies don't compose well when you need orthogonal behaviors. Composition feels more natural to me - could be just how my brain works, but it scales better in my experience.

On state management being independent - I'd be curious to hear more. Pathom is interesting for data-driven architectures. vui.el's state is intentionally minimal and Emacs-native, but you're right it could potentially be decoupled further.

On "why not full reactive" - to clarify what vui.el has: React-style hooks with explicit dependency tracking (vui-use-effect, vui-use-memo, etc.), state changes trigger re-renders, batching for multiple updates. What it doesn't have: automatic dependency inference or fine-grained reactivity where only specific widgets update. The tradeoff was debuggability - explicit deps are easier to trace than magic. But I'm open to being wrong here. What would you want from a reactive layer?