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tried writing this blog 3 times but it’s really boring, so here’s the short version: React won. Every mainstream f/w now implements its ideas, and developed their own ecosystems. The ones that didn’t, lost and died. This implies there’s no _strong_ reason to not pick one of the other winners.

but what about signals

React should have adopted signals before going nuts on a compiler or RSCs IMO. My 5 year prediction is a solid one… 😜

It would have to have been something new. Breaking likely. Signals would allow: - finer grained updates than “component” e.g. jsx fragments - state/data flow that isn’t tied to component hierarchy and doesn’t need to rerender (or subscribe to a store to rerender) itself and its children

Wasn’t the whole premise of react that re-run all the time cause it’s generally fast. Wouldn’t this break that mental model? Honestly I like the way react works, almost all the other frameworks have the same signal based reactive model. We need competing models.

It was fast compared to existing models back 8 years ago. But now it’s easy to get into trouble quickly. Fine grained reactivity is the next step, just like functional memoization was from digest cycles and dirty checking.

if it's breaking, what's the point? we already have frameworks that do this well which people can use, what good would a mediocre copy do? (and i ask this as a fan of signals)

I agree, but regrettably. I think it’s too late for React to do this. I would rather see Solid and others grow to challenge it.

for change detection. - useMemo/useCallback would actually only get used for heavy computations instead of referential stability Just spitballing here. But look at Preact signals for more ideas.

And honestly just the savings from useComputed being lazy unlike useMemo in all these apps would have been staggering.