This Week In React #98: React 18 RC2, Framer Motion, 3D Avatar, Parca, React-Native, Solito, Flutter, TypeScript, Safari...

Hi everyone!

4 big news this week:

On the React side, 2 pretty cool interactive articles.

On the React-Native side, Solito offers a cross-platform abstraction common to React-Navigation and Next.js. Nice comparisons with Flutter.

The future newsletter landing page is almost ready. I’m not really good at design so don’t hesitate to give me advice 😅

🙏 Support the newsletter:

React 18.0.0-rc.2 has just been released (under npm tag @rc). The React team published a blog post (+ 🧵 thread) to prepare us for the arrival of this new version. It includes the new concurrent features, which we can adopt incrementally.

They encourage us to test the release-candidate to detect the latest potential bugs, and offer a fairly complete upgrade guide by documenting the main api and behavioral changes. There is also a brief presentation of various new APIs.

Read this post directly, it contains many interesting details. Personally I discovered the concept of Strict Effects and that composants are now allowed to render undefined.

Interactive article by Josh Comeau on his file-system structure choices to organize a React app. Strong opinion: he explains in particular why he prefers to group files by type rather than by feature. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but it’s still an interesting read and has some good arguments.

Interactive article that presents layout animations with Framer Motion. Very well presented, with many examples. I really liked the example of Tabs with a shared layout animation: the API is quite intuitive, I didn’t know it was that easy.

💡 How to sponsor this newsletter

Visual tools like Wix or Webflow are either not flexible, complex to use or too flexible: a content creator should not decide on a margin, right?

React Bricks has the best of the 2 worlds: all the advantages of a Headless CMS and best in class Visual editing experience with no way to break the design system.

You create visually editable content blocks as React components using the react-bricks library. Content creators use these blocks to compose content with all the freedom they want and no more than they need.

Learn it in about 2 hours with the Step-by-step tutorial or the full Documentation.

Create your free account and start building now

Nicola reminds that the new architecture is coming, and presents the different initiatives to prepare the community:

Fernando Rojo regularly pushes innovation in the field of cross-platform (see also Moti and Dripsy). Solito makes it possible to share even more code between web and mobile by offering navigation primitives shared between React-Navigation and Next.js. He’s been working on this for a while, it’s not the first iteration. It also offers a monorepo example to get you started fast.

*…in all the ways that don’t matter 😄

Jamon recognizes that Flutter is good on many aspects (DX, CLI, e2e tests, upgrades, performance…). He presents the tradeoffs of both frameworks quite fairly. There is no clear winner. Some important points on which Flutter can hardly compete: web support, sharing code and knowledge, and the ability to hire.

Interesting for a React-Native dev (and also related to the article above) because it highlights the limits of its competitor Flutter to support the web (where React-Native-Web works wellà). Flutter web is not a good choice for content sites, but can remain a good solution for heavier web apps. Note that React-Native-Skia on the web will have similar tradeoffs.

😱 Microsoft is working on a TC39 proposal (stage-0) to bring type annotations to the JavaScript language syntax, inspired by TypeScript (without enums, namespaces etc…).

The browser would simply ignore those type annotations and not do any type-checking, so TypeScript (or other type-checkers) remains relevant.

This is interesting in development: we can directly execute TypeScript code without any transformation in the browser. In production, we would continue to bundle the code, because minifying and removing types remains useful (see Ryan Cavanaugh’s analogy with minification).

See also the dedicated proposal website.