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A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

blog.isquaredsoftware.com

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Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#11

Post by nkozyra »

gofreddygo wrote: post #8

ya'know, everytime there's a post with react in the title, I open it with the best positive attitude I can muster, holding back my knee jerk reaction. I then read it, and come out thinking "why, why, why do people put up with this absurdity?" and always stop at the same conclusion, cz they don't know any better. I then quietly move on with my life, sometimes leaving such comments as hints to those who might catch on.

> "why, why, why do people put up with this absurdity

For all of Reacts faults, it's not particularly absurd to use in practice and ultimately there's only one frontend/client language to work with.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#13

Post by klysm »

SPascareli13 wrote: post #6

Not a critic to the article itself, in fact I know nothing about React and learned a lot from the it, but...do we REALLY need all of this to render web pages? Even if it is a web application and not just a page, doesn't this ecosystem seem too complicated for the problem it solves?

Nope we don’t, but it solves a lot of the problems people frequently encounter while building web pages without too much of a downside. It’s a big trade off space and react sits in a very nice spot in that space.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#14

Post by klysm »

gofreddygo wrote: post #8

ya'know, everytime there's a post with react in the title, I open it with the best positive attitude I can muster, holding back my knee jerk reaction. I then read it, and come out thinking "why, why, why do people put up with this absurdity?" and always stop at the same conclusion, cz they don't know any better. I then quietly move on with my life, sometimes leaving such comments as hints to those who might catch on.

Easy to call it absurd without proposing an alternative. In the real world react solves a ton of problems and lets developers write apps.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#16

Post by Spivak »

klysm wrote: post #14
gofreddygo wrote: post #8

ya'know, everytime there's a post with react in the title, I open it with the best positive attitude I can muster, holding back my knee jerk reaction. I then read it, and come out thinking "why, why, why do people put up with this absurdity?" and always stop at the same conclusion, cz they don't know any better. I then quietly move on with my life, sometimes leaving such comments as hints to those who might catch on.

Easy to call it absurd without proposing an alternative. In the real world react solves a ton of problems and lets developers write apps.

I think most people would consider almost any other stack based UI framework that has no fear of stateful components, layout engines with constant solvers, and lets you control when and how to draw frames to be an improvement.

Imagine a world where you just had drawing and input handling primitives on the web. You wouldn't invent the DOM and then something like React to wrangle it that's for damn sure.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#17

Post by ironmagma »

gofreddygo wrote: post #8

ya'know, everytime there's a post with react in the title, I open it with the best positive attitude I can muster, holding back my knee jerk reaction. I then read it, and come out thinking "why, why, why do people put up with this absurdity?" and always stop at the same conclusion, cz they don't know any better. I then quietly move on with my life, sometimes leaving such comments as hints to those who might catch on.

It's the same thing with every technology for me. C++ is pretty absurd, same with Java/Spring framework, ditto for Linux and the whole TTY system/file descriptor hell. Anywhere where someone spends their whole life is probably going to be a big mess.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#18

Post by bobthepanda »

echelon wrote: post #7
SPascareli13 wrote: post #6

Not a critic to the article itself, in fact I know nothing about React and learned a lot from the it, but...do we REALLY need all of this to render web pages? Even if it is a web application and not just a page, doesn't this ecosystem seem too complicated for the problem it solves?

These aren't just web pages. They're full applications with robust, rich state. Web apps can reach the complexity of a desktop app with a GUI, a game, etc. I say this as a mostly backend / systems engineer: there is an incredible wealth of complexity in the frontend. In user interaction, making and transforming API calls, and in UI/UX design.

so long as browsers don't have a great way to be stateful, and tie that state to markup, then there will be a couple of major frameworks trying to square that circle.

the moment you have to keep track of any type of state, managing dozens of UI elements quickly becomes extremely tedious.

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#19

Post by acemarke »

nsonha wrote: post #3

anyone knows the status of the React Forget thingy?

It's now called "React Compiler". It's not released yet, but the dev team has been saying it'll be out _after_ React 19 but "sooner than you think":

- https://react.dev/blog/2024/02/15/react-labs-what-we-have-be...

- https://twitter.com/potetotes/status/1783713677943656819

Re: A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)

#20

Post by acemarke »

dylanhu wrote: post #4
acemarke wrote: post #2

Oh hey, that's my post! Note that I did a fairly extensive update to it in 2022 to cover React 18.

Any plans to update again to include React Server Components?

Not at this time. I'm pretty full up at this point with day job ( https://replay.io ), conferences, and personal life stuff.

My current ongoing Redux maintenance task is trying to revamp our "Redux Essentials" tutorial to be TS-first. Making slower progress on that than I'd wanted, but hopefully can get that wrapped up in the not _too_ distant future.

Beyond that, we've got a ton of open RTK Query feature requests that I'd like to address later on this year.

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