july-28.md

July 28 (discuss)

Attendees

• Ben (React)
• Christopher (React)
• Dan (React)
• Keyan (React, intern)
• Kevin (Developer Advocacy)
• Paul (React)
• Sebastian (React)
• Tom (React)

Individual Updates

Ben

• Ran the createClass codemod on the Facebook.com codebase.
• ES6 class usage is up from 30% to 80% in it!
• More good news: Public Class Fields (aka “Class Properties”) ES proposal has advanced to Stage 2.

Paul

• Continued work on the React release manager.
• Busy reviewing two pull requests: one from Keyan and one from Sebastian.
• Keyan’s pull request changes React build process to use Rollup.
• Sebastian’s pull request significantly changes how React packages are bundled internally.
• Unfortunately those changes conflict, and we are going with Sebastian’s pull request first.
• See the section below explaining these changes in more detail.

Dan

• Released Create React App.
• Lots of positive feedback.
• Working on 0.2.0 that fixes issues with cloud editors and busy ports.
• Missing features for calling it 1.0: testing, proxying API requests.
• We merged Jest support but people are concerned because it lost a ton of community trust in the first year.
• We want to use Jest because we’re excited about Snapshot Testing and are committed to improving Jest.
• Dan will make sure the testing experience is good before releasing it officially.

Kevin

• React never had people working on developer advocacy and community outreach.
• We feel it is time to improve this, and Kevin will help us.
• He already worked on revamping React Native docs which was highly successful.
• Things that need addressing: React docs, GitHub issue management.

Changes to Bundling

• Sebastian prepared a series of PRs that really split react and react-dom packages. (#7164, #7168, #7173)
• react-dom package implementation used to live inside of react package for legacy reasons.
• Now they are separated: react only contains “renderer-agnostic” things like React.Component, React.createElement, and React.Children.
• This is still work in progress, and there are many weird hacks we have to do, but we’ll reduce them over time.

Plan for Reconcilers and Renderers

• Paradoxically, react package won’t include the React algorithm (“reconciler”) anymore.
• For example, React.createElement() and React.Component stay there, but not the reconciler itself.
• This makes sense because components relying on react don’t actually care how reconciler is implemented.
• The React reconciler will exist in renderer packages such as react-dom and react-native.
• Since almost nobody uses two renderers at the same time, each renderer will use a copy of the reconciler code.
• This makes it possible for react-native and react-dom to move at different speeds and temporarily “fork” the reconciler code if needed.
• This also makes it possible for react-dom to offer the new experimental “Fiber” reconciler behind a flag without changing all the third-party components that depend on react.
• This sounds confusing but we think it’ll work better in practice.

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Please feel free to discuss these notes in the corresponding pull request.