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A Critique of React Hooks

dillonshook.com

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Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#211

Post by cageface »

baron816 wrote: post #205
cageface wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hooks are an elegant & clever idea but they can be difficult to use in practice. You really need to understand in detail how closures work. Manually managing your dependency graph and memoizing in all the right places is harder than the old class-based model in my experience. I've really enjoyed working with React but it seems to me like some of the newer frameworks like Svelte have taken the best ideas from React wi…

> Manually managing your dependency graph and memoizing in all the right places I wouldn't say it's harder, but it's certainly not simple. There are a handful of mistakes that I see repeated, but if you get over those hurdles, you can significantly simplify your components 99% of the time. It was very easy to have huge componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate methods in class components, and with logic scatter shot a…

I converted a medium-sized React codebase from classes to hooks. In most cases it simplified the components and eliminated boilerplate. But it also introduced more than a few very tricky bugs and serious performance regressions that were not trivial to fix.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#212

Post by azirbel »

desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

I for one preferred the diplomacy.

The 'magic' involved in hooks is a tradeoff; there are real benefits in the way you can consolidate logic, or mix in behaviors. Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs.

Many technologies have magical behaviors and are still very popular and useful (Rails comes to mind). I'm really liking the pros and cons being brought up in the rest of this thread.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#213

Post by nemothekid »

lhorie wrote: post #48
dcre wrote: post #28

An important point I don't see being made in the article or the comments is that hooks are meant as a more faithful (or at least less misleading) representation of what was going on under the hood in React already. The problem with the JS class representation is that people already understand what classes and instances are, and that leads to incorrect inferences about how React is working. In addition to better-organ…

It's interesting that the original appeal of React was that it was "just a view library", but now apparently it's more like a "language". It really shows the biases of the maintainers (the "just a library" thing being a philosophy I liked from vjeux, and the "language-likeness" being very obviously a heavy influence from sebmarkbage). The thing w/ "language-ness" (as opposed to "library-ness") is that additions and c…

>It's interesting that the original appeal of React was that it was "just a view library", but now apparently it's more like a "language".

I feel like that "appeal" was part of the marketing but the designers always wanted to create a new language. I switched a fairly large webapp from Angular to React pretty early on and I remember thinking that Flux (the design) was designed by someone that wished they were programming in OCaml instead. The whole "constants.js" for actions felt like a kind of defeat that they couldn't have unions and pattern matching in JS.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#214

Post by Sophistifunk »

desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

This. So much this. You are 100% correct. Hooks are incredibly stupid. No, your component is not "functional" because you don't use the word "this". You still have a "this", it's just fucking secret now so your debugging is harder. I could go on about all the other reasons hooks are stupid, but JavaScript is largely a cargo cult and I'm a nobody so I'd just be wasting my breath.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#215

Post by Sophistifunk »

orange8 wrote: post #142
stevebmark wrote: post #136

Hooks have unlocked so much power in React but still deserve critiquing. However I think the author only hinted at the major complaint I have about hooks, which is that it's no longer Javascript. It's not a function, it's sort of like type system magic. Hooks can't be nested, order matters, can't be conditionally called, and you have to understand trickier memoization to avoid bugs. It also isn't portable knowledge t…

> the major complaint I have about hooks, which is that it's no longer Javascript Are you saying that hooks are implemented in a way that needs a compiler (e.g. like CoffeeScript or TypeScript) for them to work? I've always assumed they were implemented using closures or a similar pattern.

Meaning that instead of using existing JavaScript structures to provide instance state, it's re-implemented in an abstruse way that creates a whole bunch of constraints on your code and new rules to keep in your head at at all times that are react-with-hooks-specific.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#216

Post by didericis »

efdee wrote: post #13
lpa22 wrote: post #2

I am disappointed with the React team’s decision to push functional components and hooks as the standard way of working with React. Not sure if the reason is to make React more approachable to newcomers or not, but in my experience leveraging the power of the component lifecycle through class components and decorators is the most fool-proof way to build and maintain large applications. Particularly leveraging shouldC…

The reason they introduced hooks was exactly that component lifecycle and decorators/higher order components were found not to scale well in larger codebases (as experienced by the people using React at Facebook). The useEffect pretty much provides a direct replacement for componentDidMount/componentWillUnmount. I'm still on the fence, but so far it seems to me that using hooks makes my intent clearer than using the…

Can you provide links to articles where react devs detail the scaling issues?

I've found HOCs easy to combine and reason about if I name them carefully, and am still using them on personal projects. When people complain about HOCs not scaling well, are they primarily complaining about name collisions, or performance issues due to deeply nested components/lots of render calls?

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#217

Post by yawaramin »

lhorie wrote: post #172
csmiller wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Jordan Walke created React, not Sebastian Markbåge, in which case he already moved on (to ReasonML)

Right, I meant that Sebastian is the current maintainer. Not to detract from Dan Abramov etc, but the feel I get is that Sebastian is the one who really sets the pace for where React is going these days (i.e. hooks, suspense, etc). Correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, you're factually wrong. Abramov is the current React maintainer. Markbage is obviously a core team member but contributing good ideas doesn't automatically transform one into being the project maintainer.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#218

Post by kschiffer »

Interesting to finally see some criticism about hooks.

The biggest problem I have with Hooks is readability. IMO, functional components with hooks are harder to reason about since they obfuscate logic in a weird react-specific contract. Class components have a much simpler, contract and syntax. They also felt much more natural since they picked up on familiar concepts of JavaScript, albeit with a couple of drawbacks. I get the advantages of hooks, but in a way, at least to me it seems like they, at substantial cost, solve a problem which I barely ever encountered, even after building react apps for many years.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#219

Post by ng12 »

azirbel wrote: post #212
desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

I for one preferred the diplomacy. The 'magic' involved in hooks is a tradeoff; there are real benefits in the way you can consolidate logic, or mix in behaviors. Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs. Many technologies have magical behaviors and are still very popular and useful (Rails comes to mind). I'm really liking the pros and cons being brought up in the rest of this thread.

> Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs.

To me this is the most visible win. useSelector for Redux, useIntl for react-intl, useHistory for react-router, useStyles for material-ui, etc. Almost every library I use radically simplified their API by adopting hooks.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#220

Post by hombre_fatal »

ng12 wrote: post #219
azirbel wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one preferred the diplomacy. The 'magic' involved in hooks is a tradeoff; there are real benefits in the way you can consolidate logic, or mix in behaviors. Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs. Many technologies have magical behaviors and are still very popular and useful (Rails comes to mind). I'm really liking the pros and cons being brought up in the rest of this thread.

> Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs. To me this is the most visible win. useSelector for Redux, useIntl for react-intl, useHistory for react-router, useStyles for material-ui, etc. Almost every library I use radically simplified their API by adopting hooks.

It also makes types much easier to analyze (whether using, say, VSCode's inference or Typescript) when using hooks. With HOCs, types tended to get lost through the arbitrary amount of chains.
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