How Not to Drop Your Crown. Features That React Will Surprise Developers with in 2024 and Beyond

For quite some time now, React has been the most popular technology. According to Statista, in 2023, React was used by 40.6% of software developers worldwide, which makes it the most popular frontend framework. And we’re not talking about some niche React enthusiasts here. It was adopted by such prominent companies as Meta, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, and many others. According to the StackOverflow annual developer survey, React was one of the two most popular frameworks and technologies for five years in a row, competing for first place with such JavaScript tools as jQuery and Node.js.

React seems to be doing great, but how long can it hold the palm of victory? There are many other efficient JavaScript frameworks and libraries. React should provide new features, and its ecosystem should be replenished with new third-party tools to compete with them. Today, we’ll look at what exciting features React offers to JavaScript developers to maintain its leading position in 2024.

React Compiler. No More Manual Memoization

Before reviewing what’s new in React development regarding the ecosystem, let’s consider what’s going on inside React itself and what features its developers are currently working on. As a recent post in the React blog shows, JavaScript developers will soon be able to use React Compiler in their projects. Frameworks, like Astro or Svelte, already provide developers access to their compilers, and React was on the back foot in this race. Luckily, that will change soon. By the way, Meta is already using React Compiler in production to work on Instagram features.

Let’s see how it can change the lives of JavaScript developers. Imagine that React code has some state, and a developer needs to compute it into another value. It’s not a big deal, but the value will be recomputed each time React re-renders the component, resulting in performance regressions.

To deal with this issue, developers usually used hooks, such as useMemo (called after “memoization”), useCallback, and memo. They help determine how React apps will re-render on state changes. useMemo, for example, allows developers to cache calculations between re-renders:

import { useMemo } from 'react';

function TodoList({ todos, tab }) {
const visibleTodos = useMemo(
  () => filterTodos(todos, tab),
  [todos, tab]
);
// ...
}

It works just fine, but it makes the code look messy compared to Vue.js, for example. As the compiler becomes available, the framework will automatically handle all the memoization routines. With this new feature at hand, developers are free from the necessity to write extra code. The compiler can take care of such things automatically.

Read Also How to Build an Excel Add-in With React

React developers won’t need to ask themselves whether or not memoization should be used in this particular piece of code. This feature not only makes the code more intuitive and easier to read but also makes React apps faster. The React compiler can find all places in code where memoization is needed, reducing the risk that the developer will miss them.

Camera, Motor, Actions!

Another significant feature coming up is Actions. JavaScript developers who previously worked with the Next.js framework are probably already familiar with this concept. In React, Actions allow you to pass a function to DOM elements such as <form/>, for example:

<form action={search}>
  <input name="query" />
  <button type="submit">Search</button>
</form>

Action is a function that can take all the form data and run on a client or a server. React has various hooks, such as useFormStatus, and useFormState built around it to make dealing with states and loading as intuitive as one may desire. Such an approach gives JavaScript developers more control over forms, including form submission, error handling, loading, etc.

There’s another new hook named useOptimistic. It can be used, for example, when the user clicks a reaction button under somebody’s post in a social network app. The UI will react instantly based on the expected change and following the optimistic assumption that everything went without errors. After the actual results are received from the server, the UI can change back in case of errors.

Do you want to know more about other React trends, like React Server Components, React Metaframeworks, State Management, and different AI tools for React developers? Continue reading here: https://xbsoftware.com/blog/react-trends/