React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
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Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#2Hm. I like the idea of gradual upgrades in theory, but I worry the reality will be sites loading at least two versions of React semi-permanently. And possibly even worse, you end up with an NPM dependency nightmare of off-the-shelf component X using an entirely separate React runtime.
Yet more excess JS downloading and running on client devices, all in the name of superior developer experience. I hope my cynicism is proven wrong!
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#3"It has been two and a half years since the previous major release of React, which is a long time even by our standards!"
As a mostly Python and only occasional JavaScript developer, it always felt like the biggest challenge in the JavaScript community was how fast everything moved - new libraries, frameworks and ideas would tumble past at the rate of one every few weeks, and it felt impossible to keep up.
I've been feeling that a lot less recently, and maybe the fact that React has been steady for 2.5 years is part of the reason.
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#4Hm. I like the idea of gradual upgrades in theory, but I worry the reality will be sites loading at least two versions of React semi-permanently. And possibly even worse, you end up with an NPM dependency nightmare of off-the-shelf component X using an entirely separate React runtime. Yet more excess JS downloading and running on client devices, all in the name of superior developer experience. I hope my cynicism is…
Totally hear your concern! To be clear though, it's not like we're forcing anyone to follow this approach. It was just broken before, in the same way that putting React inside a Vue/Svelte/jQuery app was subtly broken. So we've fixed the root cause but I totally agree it's only a solution to be used as a last resort. (E.g. like in our case, where many "long tail feature" components were written in 2013 and no teams own them.) In either case, even if you follow this approach, we strongly recommend to only load the second version lazily on screens that need it — like the demo shows.
It's very suboptimal but I think it's still better to have that option than not to have it — or to try it and run into insurmountable problems. Especially in big long-running projects like internal company dashboards where long-term maintenance is more important than time to first render.
(I don't know why you're being downvoted though! I think your concern makes a lot of sense, and we're also sensitive about how to balance the messaging so that people don't use this unnecessarily.)
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#5"It has been two and a half years since the previous major release of React, which is a long time even by our standards!" As a mostly Python and only occasional JavaScript developer, it always felt like the biggest challenge in the JavaScript community was how fast everything moved - new libraries, frameworks and ideas would tumble past at the rate of one every few weeks, and it felt impossible to keep up. I've been…
I second you on that. The number of times I've had to rewrite code because a framework decided to break everything with little warning.. I don't even want to think about it actually. I get wanting to make code better but gesh people, do some planning and figure out a direction to move a project.
Also it seems JS devs don't understand semver either. Massive breaking changes in patch or minor versions are just evil.
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#6"It has been two and a half years since the previous major release of React, which is a long time even by our standards!" As a mostly Python and only occasional JavaScript developer, it always felt like the biggest challenge in the JavaScript community was how fast everything moved - new libraries, frameworks and ideas would tumble past at the rate of one every few weeks, and it felt impossible to keep up. I've been…
I second you on that. The number of times I've had to rewrite code because a framework decided to break everything with little warning.. I don't even want to think about it actually. I get wanting to make code better but gesh people, do some planning and figure out a direction to move a project. Also it seems JS devs don't understand semver either. Massive breaking changes in patch or minor versions are just evil.
I've had similar experiences with JS libraries, but not so much with React. The React team are much better at managing to keep things backwardly compatible than most.
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#7React hooks is influenced by Dan, the author of Redux, not a fan of them both
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second you on that. The number of times I've had to rewrite code because a framework decided to break everything with little warning.. I don't even want to think about it actually. I get wanting to make code better but gesh people, do some planning and figure out a direction to move a project. Also it seems JS devs don't understand semver either. Massive breaking changes in patch or minor versions are just evil.
I've had similar experiences with JS libraries, but not so much with React. The React team are much better at managing to keep things backwardly compatible than most.
Agreed, I'm fairly new to React this year and while it's been a rough learning curve for me it's nice how stable it is considering some of the example code is pretty old and it still mostly works just fine
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#9"It has been two and a half years since the previous major release of React, which is a long time even by our standards!" As a mostly Python and only occasional JavaScript developer, it always felt like the biggest challenge in the JavaScript community was how fast everything moved - new libraries, frameworks and ideas would tumble past at the rate of one every few weeks, and it felt impossible to keep up. I've been…
I do feel like react has won
Re: React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
#10React hooks is influenced by Dan, the author of Redux, not a fan of them both
I'm pretty sure hooks weren't his idea. Can't remember where he said that. The fact that he enjoys communicating doesn't mean he is the only one working on react.