Why I'm excited about React 18 – talk

React 18 is coming soon. I hope 🤞

React 18 is the one with Suspense. The major refactor that enables transparent asynchronous rendering.

Yes that means you can load data without async functions and draw large animations that skip frames without UI blocking.

I showed off what that means with 2 demos at a React Dinners talk during the summer. It was lots of fun. Everyone went "Wow shiny" at suspense-for-cpu and "Omg gimme now I need this!" at suspense-for-fetch. Solves a huge pain in the ass.

The suspense-for-cpu portion is based on A better React 18 startTransition demo where I use a fractal as the worst case scenario for React rendering. Works without custom performance tricks ✌️

The suspense-for-fetch portion is based on React 18 and the future of async data

It just hit me that idiomatic <Suspense> for data fetching means there's no async, await, or promise anywhere. Shit just works 🤯

this is huge
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) July 22, 2021

You can try startTransition with React alpha versions right now, fetch is under the experimental flag. Coming in 18.x

Can't wait

So I was giving a talk about React 18 last night (video soon) and something interesting happened

The Suspense-for-cpu demo got all the oohs and aahs

But Suspense-for-fetch got all the "OMG can't wait to try this 😍"

Solve A Painful Problem really does beat shiny demos 🤔
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) July 29, 2021

Cheers,
~Swizec