The author didn't include an optimisation that the React example has.
In React you can use the PureRenderMixin [0] to avoid re-rendering subtrees if the arguments passed in are the same. In virtual-dom there's something similar called Thunk [1].
I did a partial implementation of the demo here [2] using Thunk. You can see that it performs much better than React for many thousand items. Adding items is also faster using virtual-dom.
In React you can use the PureRenderMixin [0] to avoid re-rendering subtrees if the arguments passed in are the same. In virtual-dom there's something similar called Thunk [1].
I did a partial implementation of the demo here [2] using Thunk. You can see that it performs much better than React for many thousand items. Adding items is also faster using virtual-dom.
[0] http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/pure-render-mixin.html
[1] https://github.com/Raynos/vdom-thunk
[2] http://nthtran.github.io/mercury-demo6-v2/