React Labs: What We’ve Been Working On – June 2022

React 18 was years in the making, and with it brought valuable lessons for the React team. Its release was the result of many years of research and exploring many paths. Some of those paths were successful; many more were dead-ends that led to new insights. One lesson we’ve learned is that it’s frustrating for the community to wait for new features without having insight into these paths that we’re exploring.

We typically have a number of projects being worked on at any time, ranging from the more experimental to the clearly defined. Looking ahead, we’d like to start regularly sharing more about what we’ve been working on with the community across these projects.

To set expectations, this is not a roadmap with clear timelines. Many of these projects are under active research and are difficult to put concrete ship dates on.

Server Components

We announced an experimental demo of React Server Components (RSC) in December 2020. Since than we’ve been finishing up it’s dependencies in React 18, and working on changes inspired by experimental feedback.

In particular, we’re abandoning the idea of having forked I/O libraries (eg react-fetch), and instead adopting an async/await model for better compatibility. This doesn’t technically block RSC’s release because you can also use routers for data fetching. Another change is that we’re also moving away from the file extension approach in favor of annotating boundaries.

We’re working together with Vercel and Shopify to unify bundler support for shared semantics in both Webpack and Vite. Before launch, we want to make sure that the semantics of RSCs are the same across the whole React ecosystem.