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Signals In React | Catching up with the latest trends

David Kohen on December 23, 2023

It's intriguing to see that almost every JavaScript client framework has now implemented signals. A pattern that was once deemed old and primitive...
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Gianluca

It would be about time we move to new paradigms, the current state management is stagnant and we, the developers, shouldn't be the ones optimizing for memoization in our components.

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Rense Bakker

Why not?

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Gianluca

HTMx is the answer to this question

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Lev N.

How is HTMX the answer? merely a fancy html injection parser written in plain old Javascript.

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Rense Bakker

Lol, yea... No 😂

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David Kohen

You are absolutely right, but sadly it seems that the React Team is so biased towards specific patterns that they completely ignore the opinions of the developers using their product.

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Jakub Keller

Signals is such an old concept. People go nuts over something so trivial.

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David Kohen

Well...
Server-side rendering is also a pretty old concept, yet the industry is falling head over heels for it.

But seriously, back when signals were popular, we weren't building these huge single-page applications.

But now a large movement of developers found that signals can drastically increase the performance of their applications, hence the renewed popularity.

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Idris

I think the reason why react are not adopting signal, is because they want to give developers full power and responsibility of the way there application behave.

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David Kohen

Maybe so, but it does come at the cost of performance and causes tons of spaghetti code in the process.

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Idris

And a lot of bugs.

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Gianluca • Edited

They may also be scared of taking drastic decisions at this point, React's adoption is massive and an improper execution could alienate the community.

Everything they're releasing, from concurrency to new hooks, is meticolously planned to avoid breaking changes and offer a seamless dx during the transition.

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Idris

What you said is true. But most of developers that try signal appreciates it and love it, and even want to continue using it.