React Digest - RD#496 Signals in React?

Signals in React? Not a good idea
5 minutes by Felipe Gustavo

In this article Filipe explores signals, a fine-grained reactivity approach growing in popularity among frontend frameworks but missing from React. Using signals in React requires complex workarounds for raw data handling, passing props, and conditional rendering, essentially hacking React's core behavior. Filipe suggests developers who value fine-grained reactivity should consider frameworks that natively support it rather than forcing React to behave against its design.

Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous

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Minimal state management tools
8 minutes by Audrey Behiels

Modern web applications require effective state management solutions, but choosing between Redux, Zustand, Nano Stores, Context API, Recoil, Jotai, and other options can be overwhelming. Audrey compares some of these state management tools based on complexity, performance, developer experience, and uses cases to help you select the right one for your specific project needs.

{transitions} = f(state)
4 minutes by Jordan Eldredge

In this post Jordan explores the relationship between state machines and React applications, emphasizing how React’s rendering model implicitly defines valid state transitions. He discusses strategies such as optimistic and pending state updates to mitigate these issues and ensure that invalid actions are prevented.

React Server Actions with Toast Feedback
12 minutes by Robin Wieruch

In this tutorial, Robin explores how to implement toast notifications when calling Server Actions in React. He demonstrates creating a React application where users can upvote, downvote, and delete user data entries. Key implementation points include returning a message and timestamp from Server Actions, using useActionState to manage action states, preventing duplicate toasts with timestamp tracking, and handling toast display when page refreshes occur.

There’s no such thing as an isomorphic layout effect
11 minutes by Shane Friedman

In this post Shane explains how "isomorphic layout effect" hooks, commonly used to resolve React's useLayoutEffect warnings in server-side rendering, are widely misunderstood. He details how useLayoutEffect executes after DOM changes but before browser painting, making it useful for layout calculations, but cannot run during server rendering.

webdev

• Functions in CSS?!
• Styling the HTML details and summary elements
• A Million Little Secrets

javascript

• TypeScript Founder Successfully Runs Doom Inside TypeScript's Type System
• Subverting control with weak references
• Inline rendering with document​.currentScript

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Functional programming in React

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