Vue 3.6 Beta Introduces Full‑Featured Vapor Mode—Can It Match Solid’s Performance?

Vue team released Vue 3.6.0‑beta.1, delivering the long‑awaited Vapor Mode as a feature‑complete option.

What is Vapor Mode and why it matters?

Traditional Vue acts like a translator that converts template code into a virtual‑DOM intermediate representation, compares before‑and‑after trees, and patches the browser, incurring runtime overhead and memory use. Vapor Mode works like a direct‑to‑DOM “express lane”, compiling Vue code straight to the most efficient DOM operation instructions without virtual‑DOM diffing.

Result: smaller bundle size (no virtual‑DOM scheduler) and faster runtime updates.

Core highlights of Vue 3.6 Beta

1. Vapor Mode feature parity

Vapor Mode now supports all stable features of the virtual‑DOM mode except Suspense. Directives such as v-if, v-for, v-model, component communication and slots work unchanged, turning Vapor Mode from an experimental toy into a production‑ready engine.

Official benchmarks show Vapor Mode delivering performance on par with Solid and Svelte 5 .

This places Vue at the top of the frontend performance hierarchy, eliminating its previous bottleneck.

2. Reactivity system overhaul

The underlying @vue/reactivity library has been rebuilt on alien-signals, aiming to dramatically boost reactivity speed and cut memory consumption.

Even without enabling Vapor Mode, upgrading to Vue 3.6 gives ordinary Vue apps faster reactive updates and lower memory usage.

How to try it

Vapor Mode is 100 % opt‑in. Add the vapor attribute to a <script setup> block:

<script setup vapor>
import { ref } from 'vue'

const count = ref(0)
</script>

<template>
  <button @click="count++">{{ count }}</button>
</template>

For brand‑new projects you can call createVaporApp to generate a pure Vapor application where the virtual‑DOM runtime code is fully tree‑shaken, resulting in an extremely small bundle.

Existing Vue 3 projects can install the vaporInteropPlugin to import Vapor components selectively, ideal for performance‑critical lists or charts.

Current limitations

Options API not supported : Vapor Mode is designed for the Composition API ( <script setup>) and does not work with data() or methods() syntax.

Ecosystem compatibility : Mixing Vapor components with third‑party libraries that rely on virtual DOM (e.g., Element Plus, Ant Design Vue) may trigger edge‑case bugs; the official recommendation is to isolate Vapor components.

API differences : Inside a Vapor component, getCurrentInstance() returns null.