This Week In React #113: React source code, SOLID, Remix, Docusaurus, FP, Remotion, Rapier, Hermes, RN at Airbnb...
Hi everyone!
The newsletter now enters summer mode: 1 edition out of 2. I hope you enjoy your vacations 😎.
We will launch Docusaurus 2.0 very soon (2.0-rc.1 published). I will send you a special edition for the occasion. It will be the occasion to present you better this project I work on since 2+ years with Facebook. Docusaurus 2.0 is not the most famous React framework, but it remains very used despite being in beta: twice as much as Remix or Redwood, and is progressively catching up with Gatsby. I hope I can count on you for the ProductHunt launch 😄.
This week, I want to highlight tRPC to make remote calls (client/server or even server/server). Typical end-to-end solution, agile, and much easier to use than GraphQL. There is no particular event related to the lib, except a significant gain in popularity thanks to Theo and his create-t3-app framework.
See you soon for the Docusaurus launch 👋.
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React
Alex reads the React source code and comments on several parts, taking as an entry point the mount of a React application. Interesting details about the use of prototypes, JSX, and the interaction of the (agnostic) reconciler with the DOM renderer.
Can We All Just Admit React Hooks Were a Bad Idea?
Amy argues that React hooks do not respect SOLID architecture principles. I don't really agree, but recognize that most of the examples found on the internet are simplified and don't necessarily highlight a good architecture.
Applying SOLID principles in React
Almost a direct answer to the above article, even if the application of SOLID is more widely covered here (components + hooks). Note: don't hesitate to use the React context for dependency injection.
Extras:
- 📜 Avoid anonymous components with displayName: sometimes React can't infer a good name for your components, which complicates the use of devtools (Context, memo, forwardRef, HOC)
- 📜 Why Remix is not a React framework but a full stack web framework: a well-written overview of the differences between Remix and other frameworks. Remix is full-stack and framework-agnostic.
- 📜 Functional programming is finally going mainstream: GitHub highlights the popularization of functional programming, in part thanks to React, Redux and hooks. I personally switched career from Scala to React after reading David Nolen's famous post. Didn't even like JS before 2014 😅
- 📜 Why Docusaurus is a powerful documentation framework: 1Password explains why Docusaurus is a good solution for their developer documentation portal. Touch various advanced topics, including site customizations, remark plugins to extend MDX/Markdown...
- 📜 Store data in a cookie with sessions and Remix: creation of a visit counter cookie
- 📖 Remix Deferred: new API under development that gives fine control over data loading tradeoffs on initial page load. Optimize for Time-to-first-byte or Cumulative Layout Shift.
- 📖 Next.js accessibility doc improvements
- 🐦 New Preact VDOM state model
- 🐦 Remix + React 18 startTransition + time-sliced hydration: Ryan Florence sharing a controversial tip. Starts interesting discussions about hydration (Ryan Carniato, Andrew Clark...)
- 📦 pmndrs/react-three-rapier: integrates react-three-fiber with Rapier (physics engine)
- 📦 Remotion 3.1: many new features! Gifs, Tailwind CSS, springs with duration, OffthreadVideo...
- 📦 Remix 1.6.5: loader + useLoaderData TypeScript inference👌
- 📦 Framer Motion 6.5: scroll animations
- 📦 Zustand 4.0.0-rc.2: ready for production
- 📦 Redwood 2.1
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React-Native
The JS Hermes engine is an alternative to JSC/V8. It can help your app to start faster via a pre-compilation in bytecode. With React-Native 0.70 (now in release candidate), Hermes is enabled by default. Michael shares various benchmarks from the open-source app Mattermost. The Hermes distribution mode has changed to avoid ABI incompatibility issues. Missing Intl APIs have been added on iOS. Upcoming support for BigInt and WeakRef.
What working at Airbnb during its React Native era taught me about web3
Devin goes over the history of React-Native at Airbnb and the very nuanced decision to sunset it He makes the interesting parallel with web3. In the long term, technology potential wins over the pain of early adopters.
Extras:
- 📜 Ionic - Announcing Portals for React Native: allows an integration of WebView Ionic experiences in a React-Native app. Paid product.
- 🎙️ React-Native-Radio #242 - Inspecting React Native 0.69
- 🎙️ The React Native Show #14 - React Native Paper v.5
- 📦 Vision Camera 2.14: can now chain frame processors
- 📦 expo vscode 0.8: JSON config autocomplete 👍
- 📦 expo-music-picker
- 📦 react-native-iconic
- 🧑🎨 React-Native-Skia + Expo web demo
- 🧑🎨 Instagram iOS page transitions demo
Other
Vite quickly became a reference in the frontend ecosystem. Today, it is a very good alternative to Create-React-App, with a much faster DX, and some React meta-frameworks are also using it (Storybook, Hydrogen...). v3 comes with a lot of changes, a new doc, starters for various frameworks (including React), improvements on global imports, a new doc... See also the ViteConf conference in October.
Extras:
- The Cost of Consistency in UI Frameworks
- Node.js 18.6 - Custom ESM loaders: Who, what, when, where, why, how
- A New Pattern For The Jamstack: Segmented Rendering
- Event-Driven JavaScript Development
- Chrome Dev Insider: The CSS and UI edition
- Safari Technology Preview 149
- NestJS v9
- Parcel CSS 1.12
