Hi everyone!
The newsletter is late: a new React RFC gave me a lot of reading 😄 The article by Kent C. Dodds is quite long as well but worth it. We've got 2 articles highlighting Sandpack in 2 weeks, it's probably worth looking into!
It's moving well on the React-Native core side too, with new open discussions. We could even think that after the migration to the new architecture and the stabilization of public APIs, there could be a 1.0 release? It doesn't matter much in practice, but some apparently care deeply about having a major version.
There are also quite a few interesting new things in the frontend ecosystem. I'm particularly interested in Codeflow, Fontaine and Unplugin which may be of direct interest to Docusaurus.
Speaking of Docusaurus, I was invited to talk about it in the Changelog JS Party podcast.
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⚛️ React
React RFC: First class support for promises and async/await
The React team decided to go back to an async/await model to simplify the use of Server Components. Problem: it is difficult to support async/await on Client Components. So they propose to introduce a use(promise) API on the client side. Unlike other hooks, use can be called conditionally. Later it could be used with other "usables" like the React context (in reality, you can already use useContext conditionally!). Using different APIs can also be seen as a feature: it allows to distinguish Server Components from Client Components.
This RFC gives rise to interesting debates. We wonder what the integration with data-fetching libraries will look like. The use of generators seems to be suitable for this case, but they are difficult to use in practice. We are waiting for a new RFC that will introduce a cache API.
The Web’s Next Transition
Kent C. Dodds offers a nice retrospective of the 3 main web architectures, very well illustrated and documented. He highlights the latest architecture, the trend of the moment: Progressively Enhanced Single-Page-Application. Remix is an implementation of this, with well thought abstractions that encourage to emulate the native behavior of the browser. I don't really agree that a server is absolutely necessary. Docusaurus is also a PESPA implementation that works well without JavaScript.
A World-Class Code Playground with Sandpack
Josh Comeau praises Sandpack, the CodeSandbox toolkit he uses to create interactive code playgrounds. It looks easy to use and very flexible!
- 📜 Streaming: is it worth it?: the authors of Qwik, Solid and Marko explain the advantages of streaming, and why it is difficult to adopt this technique. In a React context, the libraries used (Helmet, CSS-in-JS, Redux...) must be compatible for streaming to be effective.
- 📜 Storybook - First-class Vite support: 7.0 will soon be in beta: support for Vite without config, pre-bundling, no more need for Webpack, support for new ones like Vue 2, Lit and Svelte...
- 📜 Moving From React to htmx: feedback (article + video) on a successful migration from React to htmx. We are in a Python backend context, their conclusions would probably be different in a JavaScript context where all devs are full-stack. The JS dev did the POC and lost his job afterwards 😅.
- 📜 Prioritise content over components: interesting ideas on React components design from different perspectives: designer, developer and content author (CMS)
- 📜 A little semantic HTML trick for React components: explains how to respect the semantics of HTML by passing the DOM element to be created in props.
- 📜 Using Web Components With Next (or Any SSR Framework)
- 📜 Exploring how virtual DOM is implemented in React
- 📜 Lazy-load React components in Remix
- 🐦 React tip: isFocused should almost never be a prop
- 🚧 Streaming SSR in Preact prototype
- 🧑🎓 Create a 3D site with Game Controls in Spline and React (video)
- 🎨 Satori + React-Three-Fiber demo
- 🎨 Satori + SVG code syntax highlighting demo
- 🎙️ Docusaurus 2 is a pretty big deal
- 🎥 In Defense of useEffect
- 🎥 Making React Context Fast!
- 📦 Planby - React.js based component for schedules and timelines
- 📦 Gatsby v5 beta
- 📦 Astro 1.5
- 📦 SWR 2.0 RC
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📱 React-Native
2022: How can we improve React Native?
The React-Native team would like to have feedback on what needs to be improved in React-Native. Some points mentioned: CSS support (Yoga, gap, grid, shadows...), cross-platform support, version upgrades, debugging, keyboard, Metro symlinks...
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🔀 Other
StackBlitz Codeflow
The StackBlitz WebContainers technology allows to run Node.js in the browser via WebAssembly. You can run VS Code, Next.js or Docusaurus directly in your browser, and not via a remote Docker container. Codeflow adds the whole layer of integration with GitHub that makes it easy to open, review or edit a pull-request by running it locally in a secure way: extremely useful for open-source projects.
They also launched Web Publisher, a simplified editing view for Markdown files (editor, preview, save button). Very handy for contributing to documentation on Git, even for less technical users. There is a real preview of the content, and not the degraded experience of the GitHub Markdown preview. This is an important need for Docusaurus users.
Fontaine - Automatic font fallback based on font metrics
Permits to avoid layout shifts when loading a custom font. Makes the fallback font the same size as the final font, so that the transition is smooth and does not impact the size of the text containers. Great idea!
🤭 Fun
