Update: New in React 19 - Pre-warming
Well well, it has finally landed. This change, if you’re not a crazy person like me who likes to keep up with all the open source maintainers in the JS community, is the consequence of quite a stir caused on Twitter and Github.
In shortest terms, with React 18 you could wrap multiple components inside a Suspense boundary and React would start rendering each one before displaying the Suspense fallback. As part of their work on React 19, this behavior was changed such that the first component to trigger the Suspense boundary would cause the entire render lifecycle to short circuit and display the fallback. This was good in some cases, as the user gets to see the fallback sooner.
However it broke how some libraries leveraged Suspense in order to deliver a quality developer experience. For example React Three Fiber uses Suspense boundaries with multiple children to do background work like loading assets/models and then commit the entire set of children onto the screen.
The React team heard their point of view (and of course that of others), and back they went to the drawing board to implement Suspense in a way that appeased all. So go read about the announcement! You’ll gain a lot of context, and maybe even feel inspired on how to solve your own engineering hurdles!
As a little bonus, here’s some tweets you can look into to give yourself some context on the discourse (and so that it doesn’t seem like I’m pulling this out of my ass)
- Paul Henschel of React Three Fiber / Poimandres https://x.com/0xca0a/status/1803542646561861920
- Tanner Linsley of Tanstack https://x.com/tannerlinsley/status/1803524593505935591
- Dominik Dorfmeister of React Query https://x.com/tkdodo/status/1800917549825081549
As you may be able to infer from the timestamps, it was a pretty dramatic day.
https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/29898#issuecomment-2477449973
Essential Typescript for React
I love me a good article that just says “here’s some cool information, have a nice day!” That’s exactly what we get from Jacob in this article.
React types are kinda confusing. ReactNode vs ReactElement? Is it React.JSX.Element or JSX.Element? PropsWithChildren or just & { children?: ReactNode }? Not to mention when you have to write polymorphic components for whatever reason. How do you write the type props to be forwarded to base JSX elements elegantly?
Consult this article to get recommendations from Jacob Paris, who does a lot of Remix / Web Dev related content.
https://www.jacobparis.com/content/react-ts
The two factions of C++
This one is special because its so incredibly niche, but also because the website is an absolute pleasure to peruse. That lovely background color “Lemon Chiffon” (#FFF5D1) with the serif typeface gets you this lovely parchment-like look.
Anyhoo, I did not know that C++ had so much beef going on. Coming from the JS world, it’s always surprising when more established communities have any kind of discourse cus like… what do you even have to argue about this late into the game? Well as I found out, it’s the future of the language.
With the world rewriting itself into Rust or Zig, the US Government citing “memory safety” as one of their focuses in new lines of code written, you’d wonder what C++ is doing to stay competitive.
Apparently its um… complicated. A super interesting read, and a blog I’ll definitely be revisiting.