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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… 😜

I still genuinely don't know what "React adopt signals" would _mean_ at a technical level. Per other comments in this thread, React works at the component level. What would a hypothetical native-to-React signals integration do differently?

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.

what changed that made it easy to get into trouble? Didn't fine grained reactivity existed before too? I remember knockout, heck even vue was released around similar time (which had reactive model like knockout). Iirc a team member had mentioned that they haven't ruled signals for optimization

Fine-grained reactivity *in the platform*, I'd say. Signals (by other names) have been around since long before React. They didn't have the juice on their own back then. We'll see if they do now.

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.

The reality of the business is that React is the 2 ton gorilla in the room. It's got jQuery levels of momentum, if not more. Nothing else is gonna make a dent without a solid, and relatively painless, migration story. Not for a long while at least.

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.

The cynical reason why this never happened in React would be because it devalues React. If you don't need components to build complex trees of state, you barely need components at all. And then you barely need react at all. Working on React or a React FW subconsciously biases away from that.