DEV Community: Sebastien Lorber

This Week In React #305 : X, Forms, e18e, Next.js, TanStack Start | Exact, Discord, Shopify, Expo Modules | Node.js, Safari

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 13:49:35 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week, X explained how it rebuilt its flagship app with streaming SSR, Suspense and Relay. e18e launched independent benchmarks for 9 meta-frameworks.

On mobile, Discord follows Shopify and leaves React Native for native and Rust. Meanwhile, Expo’s co-founder previewed Exact, an agent-native app framework written in Rust. We also have many releases: Audio API 1.0, Bottom Sheet 0.18, Keychain 11, Gesture Handler 3.5…

Elsewhere, Node.js shipped security releases, Safari 27.3 beta brings Temporal and using to all browsers. The State of JS survey is open: if you like our work, please mention us 🙏.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

X Engineering - Rebuilding the global town square from scratch

One of the world's largest React apps is currently rolling out a major rewrite. Logged-out users and crawlers already see the new app, and signed-in users are moving over one country at a time. Since Twitter Lite (2017), X has been a client-side React app: the browser downloads JavaScript, then asks for data, then renders, leading to performance issues. Additional SSR servers handled search crawlers and link-preview bots. The new architecture uses a single server for people, crawlers and link-preview bots, and optimizes its response according to who's asking.

The article is a detailed write-up sharing various lessons learned and impressive performance results, in particular on slow connections, where a profile's first post now shows in 2.7s instead of 23.9s. Since we are a React newsletter, here's what is likely to interest you the most:

New stack - The new app is built on Vite, React, Relay and Fastify. The former stack already used Relay/GraphQL, which remains interesting for colocating data requirements with components and making preloading easy.
Streaming SSR with Suspense - The server sends the page shell right away, then streams each part as its data arrives. Profiles and posts download no JavaScript before the first post shows.
Hydrating before the stream ends - With an async module entry, React hydrates the shell immediately, then each boundary as it streams in. They also prioritize the loading of the render-blocking stylesheet: even if it slightly delays React hydration, it gives a better First Contentful Paint on slow connections.
Relay without refetching - Route loaders start the GraphQL queries while the server renders. The page carries each response once as JSON, and the browser replays it into an empty Relay store.
Intent preloading - Links preload their route's code and data on hover or focus so that navigation feels fast.
AI usage - Five engineers built the first version in under six months. Agents helped with the implementation, porting behaviors of the old servers to the new architecture, with scripts to ensure parity.

💸 PropelAuth - Don’t Trust Your AI Agent. Scope It.
📖 React <form> docs improvements - React 19 resets uncontrolled fields after a successful form Action, which surprised many devs. The <form> docs now explain how to keep values (defaultValue from state or useActionState, even before JS loads), skip or schedule the reset with requestFormReset, pass extra data to Server Functions, and get useFormStatus pending state from an onSubmit handler.
📊 e18e Framework Performance project - Benchmarks for 9 meta-frameworks, including Next.js, TanStack Start and React Router - This independent initiative, built with each framework's maintainers, makes comparisons fairer and has already led to upstream perf fixes, such as 75% faster RSC payload parsing in React.
📅 React Foundation Contributors Summit 2026 - 10–12 Nov - London - The first contributor summit is happening right now. Since we are not there, please let us know if you have any insider scoop 🥹.
📜 How we cut Next.js memory from ~5GB to ~1GB: the React-Query timer holding every SSR request - An interesting memory leak case and methodology used to fix it. Any setTimeout created during SSR captures the AsyncLocalStorage contexts. Here, the React Query GC timer led to that leak, capturing the Next.js Request store. Query v4/v5 disables the GC on the server, so beware of not re-enabling it by passing an explicit gcTime.
📜 Why we finally left Next.js for TanStack Start - Positive feedback on migrating a large app to TanStack Start, following recurring memory leaks in Next.js. Abstracting the next/* framework imports behind a thin layer made it possible to run both frameworks side by side using build-time aliases.
💸 PostHog - WTF is a forward deployed engineer? (and why everyone is hiring them)
📦 MobX React Plugin 1.0 - Automatic observer(), "use no memo" for React Compiler, async methods turned into flows - This new official Vite/Babel plugin fixes a long-standing MobX incompatibility with the React Compiler.
📦 Storybook 11 beta - Official agent skills, headless storybook tools CLI, type-safe CSF 4 stories, react-component-meta docgen
📦 Zustand 5.1 - Async persist storage and migrations, awaitable rehydrate(), dispatch actions from Redux DevTools
📦 XState 6 beta - Transitions as plain functions, Standard Schema types, xstate/fsm is back, durable execution (experimental), CLI
📦 Text.js 1.0 - React framework for apps that render inside console.log
📦 Preact 11.2 - Scoped custom element registries in shadow roots, smaller bundle
📦 mdx-content-mapper 0.0.3 → 0.0.4 - Type-check MDX files with tsc, using TypeScript 7.1 content mappers
📦 React Hook Form 7.92 - Bug fixes for validation, field arrays, reset() and useController, fewer form state clones
📦 React Resizable Panels 4.19 → 4.21 - Tear-off tabs, drag tabs between windows, floating tabsets, collapse and maximize buttons
📦 Astryx 0.7.1 → 0.7.13 - iOS-like Lightbox gestures, reorderable lists, table virtualization, keyboard-aware ChatLayout
📦 dx-styles 1.5 - Faster builds, upgrades wyw-in-js, reproducible CSS-in-JS benchmark
📦 Next-Intl 4.15 - Support intl-messageformat 12, lazy-loaded SWC in the message extractor, middleware fixes

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📱 React-Native

Exact - Agent-native app framework in Rust

Expo co-founder Charlie Cheever shared a pre-alpha preview of Exact. It's a cross-platform app framework written in Rust, designed for agents to write, run and test apps. You describe the UI in 𝕏 Contract, a new declarative language, and write the logic in TypeScript or Rust. Models have never seen Contract, but it's small and constrained on purpose, so agents learn it quickly. Exact promises near-instant startup, smooth scrolling, edits applied in about 100ms, and the same test running unchanged on web, mobile and desktop.

Related resources:

🧵 Discord follows Shopify, leaving React Native for native and Rust

Another big app is moving away from React Native! Discord is dropping both Electron and React Native, extending its shared Rust core. On desktop, the UI moves to GPUI. On mobile, the Rust core now drives native views.

It comes only two months after Shopify left React Native, but the approach is quite different. Shopify went back to separate Swift and Kotlin apps, betting that agents make writing the code twice affordable. This week, they explained how they rebuilt the app in 12 weeks with Helix, Reflex and remote dev. With Reflex, a single behavior test suite runs against headless ViewModels, without a simulator, to keep iOS and Android in sync.

Related resources:

💸 Sentry - Find the slow request in your React Native checkout flow. Get the recipe
🐦 Expo plugin back in Codex - Skills and MCP server in one plugin
📜 Inside the new JNI layer in Expo Modules 2.0 - Up to 51 times faster C++ calls than fbjni. JS Objects reach Kotlin 3 to 5 times faster, improving the slowest part of every call between Kotlin and C++ on Android.
📜 React Native vs Swift and Kotlin: How We Choose the Stack - Before choosing a stack, ask what the product needs to do, how fast it must ship, and who maintains it. Gobi moved to native in stages once bridging cost more than rewriting.
📜 How to Speed Up Your Maestro Tests: A Practical Guide
💸 Bitrise - The best practices behind safe React Native OTA updates.
📦 Google Maps Navigation SDK 0.19 - iOS 17 minimum, Android SDK 8, iOS SDK 11.3, route-token-only destinations, ROUTING_TIMEOUT support - Route token only setup (iOS) avoids waypoint drift plus a new timeout status to handle (Android).
📦 Keyboard Controller 1.23 - Precise input tracking, preload artifact fix, transparent KeyboardExtender
📦 Gesture Handler 3.5 - Begin, Deactivate and Finalize events, Pan velocity and Pressable fixes
📦 React Native Keychain 11 - TurboModules and New Architecture only, Swift Package Manager (preview), getAllInternetCredentialServers()
📦 Screen Transitions 4.1 → 4.2 - Smoother transitions and gestures, built-in clipping, stable Expo Router integration
📦 Sentry 8.34 - iOS JS hang tracking, Hermes samples in Android profiles, long task metric
📦 Skia 3.10 - SkShapeBlob + canvas.drawShapes for static shape batching, replay allocation cuts, Skia m158
📦 True Sheet 4.1 - dimBlur backdrop, stacked sheet fixes, Android gesture fixes
📦 Bottom Sheet 0.18 - Web support, floating cards, lazy mounting and snapping overhaul
📦 Audio API 1.0 - First stable, spatial audio, Recorder 2.0, worklets split out
🤖 Simlock 0.6 - Named device baselines, seed based simulators and emulators, MCP enrolled phones
🤖 Argent 0.32 - Android network inspector, physical iPhone gestures, remote simulator recording

🔀 Other

🔐 Node.js security releases - High severity fixes for the 22, 24 and 26 lines
💬 Mermaid v13 RFC - Full rewrite, DOM-free rendering, SSR, plugin system and smaller bundle - With all the recent diagram lib competitors, Mermaid is finally planning to catch up.
📊 State of JavaScript 2026 - Survey is now open - Last year, we ranked among the top 5 newsletters. If you like our work, please mention us in the resources section 🙏
📜 Notable V8 changes from Node.js 26 to 27 (Alpha) - For once, we get a detailed official blog post of what’s coming with the V8 upgrade (14.6 → 15.6) related to Iterator, Math and more.
📦 Rolldown 1.3 - Import attributes (experimental), agent-friendly build report (experimental), @rolldown/perf-kit - The new Perf Kit could help your agent make your app faster.
📦 Safari 27.3 beta - Temporal, using, CSS @function, if(), attr(), corner-shape, popover="hint", closedby, and more - Many of these features are going to be in all browsers soon, including Temporal and using!
📦 Playwright 1.65 - Run tests with Bun, onlyFailures reports, -exclusive- test lock
📦 Prettier 3.10 - New Yuku high-performance JS/TS parser plugin, new Flow syntax, support for new JS proposals
📦 pnpm 12.17 → 12.19 - pnpm fund, per-skill approval of agent skills, pnpm store add for offline installs, JSON-like lockfile format (experimental), security fix
📦 ESLint Shell - Language plugin for Bash, POSIX sh and mksh scripts
🤖 Modern Web Guidance 1.0 - Chrome's web platform skills for coding agents are stable, Firefox and Edge join the project

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #304 : Next.js, Compiler, Redux Toolkit | RN 0.89 RC, Vega OS, Screens | Node.js, Parcel, Rspack

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:58:52 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

Calm week on the React side, but we found a few interesting Next.js PRs to look at and a few Async React blog posts.

On mobile, the first React Native 0.89 RC is here, with lots of performance work. Amazon Vega OS 2.0 brings RN 0.83 to every Vega-powered Fire TV. Hermes gets a full Intl implementation, still in preview. Screens v5 is coming.

Elsewhere, GitHub Actions will block pull_request_target by default. Node.js 27 is the first alpha of the new release model. Parcel 3 is a much faster Rust rewrite.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

💸 Testing Frontend - Lessons from over a million lines of TypeScript at Palantir - Skip component tests and let Meticulous do the rest
🔐 Next.js November security releases 16.4.5 & 15.5.29 - Fixing 7 medium vulnerabilities
🐦 Remotion - New Studio editing experience - A better, more interactive timeline that’s still code-based but now matches the UX of video editing tools better.
👀 React Compiler PR - Preserve source locations for accurate source maps - This should help fix source map issues when using the React Compiler, bug reports in various downstream projects.
👀 React Concurrent Store PR - Ricky Hanlon runs React's own state tests against the unofficial ponyfill
👀 Next.js PR - router.experimental_prepare() to start a navigation on pointerdown and commit it on click - This is quite an exciting feature I’ve been wanting for years. There’s a delay between pointerdown and click events. Now you can “prepare” a navigation ahead of time, even if the user hasn’t really clicked your link yet. Once the click is confirmed, you commit the pre-warmed navigation that should feel faster. This may be integrated into the <Link> component eventually.
👀 Next.js PR - create-next-app always uses the App Router, no router choice prompt
👀 Next.js PR - Experimental Go Route Handlers with route.go files - The Next.js team is prototyping native language support for CPU-intensive server work next to your React app, starting with Route Handlers and Proxy in Go.
📜 React.lazy, Suspense and the Hidden 300 ms Delay - A React.lazy component always suspends on its first render, and React throttles Suspense reveals to 300ms to avoid flicker, which can be a problem in some cases.
📜 Async React & Progressive Server Actions - When using Server Actions with client-side optimistic UI, it’s easy to break your form progressive enhancement behavior. Thankfully, you can restore it with a simple trick: only wire the optimistic action after hydration.
📜 Understanding React internals - A 6-chapter tour, from Fizz and Flight on the server to hydration, lanes and the commit phase, with code taken from React's source.
📜 Writable Derived State: Stop Synchronizing State - Instead of syncing server data into local client data with useEffect, you could simply use clientData ?? serverData. The client data can be null after a server refresh.
💸 PropelAuth - How to Build a Good Consent Screen for OAuth And MCP
📦 Redux Toolkit 2.14 - Faster dispatch, RTK Query cache entry selectors, DevTools action sanitizer, many RTK Query fixes - There’s also a new 2.x and 3.0 roadmap that announces what’s coming next.
📦 React Resizable Panels 4.16 → 4.18 - New <Workspace> component for IDE-like layouts, draggable and collapsible tabsets
📦 Preact 11.1 - preact/compat/compiler-runtime for React Compiler apps
📦 TanStack Redact 0.3 - Webpack and Rspack plugins for browser SPAs, Rsbuild setup guide
📦 Inertia 3.10 → 3.11 - Live props refreshed by broadcast events (Laravel Echo), QUERY HTTP method, stale navigation fixes
📦 Skullet - Skeleton loading states measured from your real components
📦 ESLint Plugin React “You Might Not Need An Effect” 1.1 - Support renamed React hook imports
📦 safe-mdx 2.0 → 2.1 - Render MDX in React without eval, streaming parser for LLM output

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📱 React-Native

Vega OS 2.0

Vega OS 2.0 is out now on every Vega-powered Fire TV, bringing RN 0.83: React 19, the compiler, Hermes v1, and real DevTools.

It also brings native APIs, agent-assisted migrations, and stable minors with one major a year.

TV focus states - new boxShadow and outline props, plus compat updates for Navigation, Reanimated, and Lottie.
Beyond RN - native APIs for task scheduling and custom UI, with hybrid-UI and periodic-task sample apps.
DevAssistant - docs AI with a Vega domain selector and page-level context, so less doc-hunting.

💸 build mode - What happens to engineers when AI writes all the code?
👀 React Native 0.89 RC - Faster text layout and native module calls, legacy bridge APIs removed, useAppState() hook, experimental_onSafeAreaInsetsChange, global structuredClone - A sneak peek of the upcoming version, due Dec 7, with lots of performance work and legacy architecture cleanup.
👀 React Native PR - Public visual regression testing for RNTester in CI - Rendering regressions now surface on public PRs. Unlocks porting the rest of the internal jest-e2e rendering tests.
🔐 Better Auth security release - Including a critical fix in the Expo integration
🐦 Full Intl implementation for Hermes, based on ICU4X - ~19MB per platform for complete Intl. RN podspec needs to be updated, so this is only a preview.
📜 Apple Developer Program explained: free vs paid - Breakdown of tiers and how Expo keeps costs at \$0 until you're ready to publish.
📜 A WebGPU cat puzzle game shipped in three days on Expo, with an AI agent as the QA team - Case study of a solo dev shipping a GPU game to the App Store and web in 3 days with one TypeScript engine, TypeGPU shaders, and agent testing.
💸 Maestro MCP - How to get your coding agent to verify UI changes on iOS and Android
📦 Screens 5.0 beta - RN 0.88, iOS contained modals, Android Stack v5 animation presets, iOS 27 header minimization controls, Liquid Glass opt-out for form sheets
📦 WebView 17.0 → 17.1 - Public RN codegen APIs, RN 0.80+ required, Android profile prop for isolated cookie jars
📦 Nitro Fetch 1.10 - XMLHttpRequest bridge, non-persisted native prefetch(), pre-warmed Cronet engine with configurable cache
📦 Pager View 10.0 - Rewritten as a Function component, native view ref, keyboard and nested ScrollView fixes
📦 Maestro 2.12 - Queue priority for Cloud uploads, Xcode 27 simulators, faster Android typing
📦 Unistyles 3.7 → 3.8 - Zero Babel transforms with the Metro integration, 2–8x faster web style updates, DevTools performance track, RN 0.85+ required
📦 Safe Area Context 5.11 - Corner-adapted insets, Android subtree insets, web scroll fix
📦 RN TGFX - Declarative GPU 2D canvas powered by Tencent's tgfx and Nitro
📦 Skia 3.9 - colorSpace prop, async readbacks, background GPU + Imagination fixes
📦 NativeKeel - Library scanner that checks dependencies for breakage
🤖 Simlock - Turn Mac into a simulator cloud that manages itself
🤖 Agent-Desktop - Computer use CLI for AI agents on macOS, Windows and Linux, through the accessibility tree
🤖 Argent 0.31 - HarmonyOS support, faster MCP captures
🤖 RAG 0.11 - async LLM runner, context-length fitting, worklets 0.13 support
🤖 How to make your CI 10x faster with e2e? - Run only tests that matter. Use a decision-based model to filter by what the change touches instead of the whole suite on every push.
🤖 Argent e2e Tutorial: Record a Mobile Test and Run It in CI - The agent records the test once in YAML, then CI replays without any model.
🎙️ Software Mansion podcast - "Maybe React Native Is Impossible" with Chas Jhin from Discord

🔀 Other

🔐 GitHub Actions - pull_request_target blocked by default in public repositories from December 2 - Good news for supply chain security. This “feature” led to compromises like TanStack, PostHog, Nx, and more.
📦 Chrome 157 - HTML-in-Canvas stable: Interactive DOM inside 2D, WebGL, and WebGPU - Chrome 157 is now out, including this exciting feature (unflagged) that unlocks many creative use cases.
📦 Node.js 27.0 alpha - V8 15.6, npm 12.1, default heap size changes, --allow-env permission, native fs.glob, net/promises API - The first Alpha of the new release model, not based on even/odd numbers anymore. It becomes Current in April 2027 and LTS in October 2027.
📦 jsdom 31.0 - New CSS engine - Faster selector queries and repeated style reads. Now supports many new CSS features such as cascade layers, nesting, scoping, and more.
📦 Parcel 3.0 alpha - Rust rewrite, up to 100x faster, standalone binary, native plugins, smarter code splitting
📦 Rspack 2.3 - SWC Next parser, 5–20% faster builds, up to 27% lower memory, less duplicate code across chunks, CSS improvements, new cache (experimental)
📦 Vitest 5.1 - --since-last-run, interactive snapshot review, Trace View on failure by default, faster Browser Mode mocking, 5–10x faster Istanbul instrumentation
📦 Babel 8.1 - Import Bytes/Text, filtered namespaces, source map range mappings (experimental), @babel/eslint-plugin configs
📦 tRPC 11.20 → 11.24 - Per-procedure error formatters with .errors(), stable localLink, TanStack Query handles (unstable), Next.js App Router cache tags
📦 x18n - Lint, view and manage i18n files for any framework

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #303 : TanStack, Next.js | Expo Desktop, Legend Spark, Nitro | Node.js, Bun, SWC

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:23:18 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week is full of TanStack releases with Redact, AI, and DB. Redact is a smaller, synchronous version of React.

On mobile, it's an interesting week for native desktop app development and Nitro. Expo founders are cooking something new 👀.

Node v26 is now LTS. SWC’s next version is much faster. Bun now ships a code formatter.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

TanStack Redact

Tanner Linsley's AI-driven React projection experiment is now a real TanStack project adopted in production. Redact is a smaller React-compatible runtime for the browser. Already working with Start, Next.js, Vinext, and Vite. On the server, nothing changes: React still handles SSR and Server Components.

Although it’s smaller, the main tradeoff is that Redact renders synchronously, without React's time slicing features. The blog post acknowledges that “a heavy render can still delay input”.

💸 Sentry - 41 companies have now funded $8.4M through the Open Source Pledge. See how we're supporting OSS.
🔐 Next.js - Upcoming November security release - Planned for November 3: 7 medium-severity vulnerabilities.
📜 Owner - Moving 10K+ restaurant websites from Next.js to Astro - React now only runs in islands. Their p75 menu-page LCP went from 5.4s to 0.7s.
📜 Design Systems Should Be Fast by Default - Timed 10 design systems opening a 249-country select and checking 100 checkboxes. Among the 4 React ones, React Spectrum was the slowest to open (227ms), and Ant Design took 6x longer than MUI to check them all.
📜 Optimizing the sh*t out of TanStack Start
📜 What Is a Hydration Mismatch Error and How Do You Fix It?
📜 AI Writes Forms Pretty Well; Here's Why We'd Still Hand It a Library
📦 TanStack AI 1.0 - Stable core APIs, 23 provider adapters, subagents, MCP servers, experimental agent harness - The framework-agnostic AI interface removed deprecated APIs and commits to API stability. Comes with first-class React bindings and hooks such as useChat().
📦 Motion 13.5 → 14.7 - scopeMotion(), animateLayout() for vanilla JS, keyboard reordering, stagger grids, exit transitions - The new useScopeMotion() hook groups animations, gestures, and scroll listeners. Then you can stop/cancel them together. Called automatically when a component unmounts.
📦 Vinext 1.4 - Less server work, faster hydration, and lighter prefetching
📦 TanStack DB 1.0 RC - Going All In on Oracles
📦 React Hook Form 7.91 - Field array, async validation and <Form /> submission fixes, fewer re-renders
📦 React Window 2.5 - Page scrolling with scrollElement, headless useVirtualizer() hook, useIsScrolling(), scroll-padding support
📦 React Resizable Panels 4.15 - useParentGroup(), useParentPanel() and useParentGrid() hooks, imperative resizing takes space from neighbors
📦 Module Federation for TanStack Start - Micro-frontends with federated SSR, for Vite and Rsbuild
🤖 Next.js skill - next-bundle-optimizer - This new Vercel skill for Next.js 16.4 gives your agent the Turbopack module graph to optimize your app. It can find imports that defeat lazy loading, duplicated dependencies, and failed tree shaking.

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Install wizard, to get you set up in twenty minutes
Improved architecture, to avoid autoscaling and complex caching
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Online dashboard with detailed metrics
Fingerprinting to prevent incompatible updates

That way you can the Expo Update or CodePush bills, with just a $12 virtual machine and minimal effort.

Try it out with the local evaluation stack, which installs the full stack with one command.

https://patch.codemagic.io/docs

📱 React-Native

React Native on Desktop

React Native on desktop had a big week in 3 acts:

📦 React Native Windows 0.85 is out, completing the move to the New Architecture.

📦 Expo Desktop v1 is an independent project from Jamie Birch, not endorsed or maintained by Expo:

Best-effort macOS and Windows support for Expo apps: create an app with npx expo-desktop create-app, then run Prebuild, CNG, and run macos/windows commands
One Expo codebase targets iOS, Android, web, macOS, and Windows
Currently running on Expo SDK 55 until the native macOS (RN 0.83) catches up.

📦 Legend Spark is a desktop framework from Jay Meistrich built right on top of it, aiming to ease the migration from Electron/Tauri:

Desktop modules included: window management, menu bar icons, and friends
No Xcode or native build to get started: new apps open in a prebuilt runner, like Expo Go for desktop. Upgrade to a custom build when you need new modules or want to publish.
Patches libraries that don't support desktop yet
Dogfooded: all of the Legend apps (Diff, Code, Music, Chat History, Photos) already run on Spark.
Windows support in progress.

Nitro breaks out of React Native

Interesting week for Nitro too:

🐦 Nitro v1 enters alpha: HybridObject becomes an actual class, with a new API and better performance.
🐦 Decoupled from React Native: the new nitro-core package needs only JSI, opening the door to Lynx, NativeScript, and any JSI runtime.
🐦 Nitro Modules on Node.js: runs on Node through node-api-jsi, ABI-stable prebuilt binaries, early WIP.

💸 PostHog - 6-7 loops we use every day to make PostHog self-driving
👀 Exact - Write an app once, run it natively on the web, macOS, iOS, and Linux, and let an agent build, run, see, and test it - Expo founders are actively working on a new native and agentic cross-platform development solution. Not React, using a Contract UI/interaction DSL. This has been lightly 𝕏 teased by Charlie Cheever, and we’ll probably have an announcement soon. The repo is already public, so you can have a sneak peek of what’s cooking here.
🐦 React Native perf updates in the works - 24% less JS thread CPU, 40% fewer scroll hitches on iOS, 86% less Yoga layout work
📜 Hello, Graphite: Performance - The move from Ganesh to Graphite improved performance of RN Skia. Reaching 120fps on much more complex scenes is achievable now.
📜 Introducing ScrollViewMarker in react-native-screens - Upcoming Screens 5 fixes tabs not minimizing when scrolling by letting you declare the content scroll view.
📜 A 30,000-line Rust GPU engine on Expo, and 120,000 installs without ads - Case study of a 2-person team shipping to iOS, Android, and Windows with one Expo codebase and a Rust engine wrapped in native modules and a config plugin.
📜 Expo - How to ready your app for iPhone Duo: SDK 58 changes, Expo Router, and new APIs - New horizontal safe area insets for the rail, plus new APIs for the rest of the hardware, expo-hinge for the angle, reserved regions for the fold, and ArrangementView for two-pane layouts.
📜 How React Native Works Under the Hood
💸 Maestro MCP - Let your coding agent write, run and debug your UI tests
📦 Unistyles 3.6 - Experimental zero-config Metro integration, 2x faster plain view re-renders, Reanimated CSS transitions follow theme changes
📦 Actions Sheet 11.0 - UI-thread gesture engine, velocity-based snapping, SheetGestureBlocker for maps and WebViews
📦 Bottom Tabs 1.5 - RN 0.87 support, Swift Package Manager, prominent tab role on iOS 27+, AGP 9 fixes
📦 Radon 1.20 - iPhone Duo simulator support, React Native 0.88, Expo SDK 58
📦 CRNL 0.64 - C++ template graduates from experimental, React Native 0.88, Expo SDK 58
📦 Keyframer Inspector - Animation debugger for dev builds: dropped frames, slow motion, spring tuning written back to code
📦 Legend List 3.7 - Reliable programmatic scrolling, new cancelScroll, scrollToKey and anchorVisibleContent ref methods
📦 RNSEC 1.4 - 18 new security rules, CI integrations with SARIF and baselines, fewer false positives
📦 Sentry 8.32 - Traces linked into embedded WebViews and Expo DOM components
🤖 Expo Agent CLI - Helps coding agents understand Expo projects, use npm package co-located skills, run apps and development workflows.
🤖 Argent 0.30 - Fold Android emulators, capture XMLHttpRequest and axios traffic, flows renamed to e2e
🤖 Agent Device 0.21.32 - React components inspectable through Metro, Fire TV and native macOS app support, multi-touch and hardware buttons
🤖 ExecuTorch 0.11 - LLM sampler with constrained decoding, 16k context, depth estimation, image inpainting, on-device vector store

🔀 Other

🔐 Node.js security releases - “Node2Shell” remote code execution in Brotli decoder - Upgrade your Node.js (or Bun) now if your app decodes Brotli data under someone else's control.
📜 The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks - Building the same Pokédex app with Claude in 12 frameworks, with a conformance test suite.
📦 Node.js 26.13 - New "Lithium" LTS - v26 just transitioned into Long Term Support.
📦 Bun 1.4.4 - bun fmt, faster bun check, and more - Comes with a new Prettier-compatible code formatter and many other improvements. Also fixes the Node2Shell vulnerability.
📦 SWC Next - Flat ESTree-based AST, up to 3x faster native parsing, up to 10x faster through the JS API - The next version of SWC will be much faster. Takes inspiration from the Yuku parser architecture. Coming in Rspack 2.3.
📦 Reylo - Import .sql files into TypeScript with full type inference - The creator of Zod leverages the brand-new TS 7.1 (beta) content mappers to infer types from SQL files. He also released Motherload, which does the same and provides type safety for TOML, YAML, CSV, Markdown front matter, .env, and other data files.
📦 pnpm 12.14 → 12.16 - pnpm-workspace.yml includes, tar-based lockfile integrity, zstd registry responses, global --env-file, security fixes - As a heavy catalogs user, I particularly like the ability to split my large config file into multiple smaller and focused parts.
📦 Biome 2.6 - Markdown, YAML and SCSS support, JavaScript plugins (preview), Tailwind v4 class sorting, biome inspect, new type inference engine
📦 Firefox 159 - Scroll-driven animations, scoped custom element registries, streaming HTML sanitization - CSS scroll-driven animations are now available in all browsers!
📦 Safari 27.1 → 27.2 - iPhone Duo, Device Posture and Viewport Segments APIs behind flags
📦 Remix 3.1 - 2x faster SSR, frame prefetching with prefetch(), streaming file uploads (future API)

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #302 : Next.js, React Router, DevTools, Security | RN 0.88, Expo 58, Navigation | TypeScript, PHP, CrUX

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:30:07 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

It’s a heavy security week, with patches from React and Next.js. Not React-related, but there's also a very bad “php2shell” vulnerability that has just been disclosed. Upgrade now!

On mobile, React Native 0.88 is out, switching to the web event model with no breaking changes. Expo SDK 58 ships with tons of features, ready for iOS 27 and iPhone Duo.

Outside React, TypeScript makes the headlines. v7.1 is in beta, with a new API to build devtools upon. A Rust port of the type checker is now backed by Cloudflare/VoidZero, and already faster than the official Go version.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

💸 build mode - What nobody tells you about writing agent skills
🔐 React vulnerability - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in React Server Components - Patched in React 19.3.1 and the 19.0.9, 19.1.10 and 19.2.9 backports, together with a Server Functions DoS. In Next.js, the RCE affects "use cache" functions returning multiple typed arrays. Upgrade to 16.4.1 or 15.5.28, which also fixes a critical RCE in sharp via SVG images.
📅 React Foundation Meetup - Nov 11, London - We recently mentioned a React Foundation contributor summit, invite-only. But there’s also the first official React Foundation public meetup happening the same week at Meta King’s Cross.
👀 Next.js PR - <Link prefetch="navigation"> - Adds a way to prefetch past the recently-introduced await navigation() boundaries for links users are likely to click.
👀 React docs - React DevTools for agents - The experimental react-devtools-cdt-mcp package is now documented, with a live sandbox. Registers 12 additional React-specific tools with the Chrome DevTools MCP.
📜 Improving navigation experience in v0 with Next.js 16.4 - The next-partial-prefetching-optimizer skill helps your agent refactor until an instant() test proves the UI is ready before the click.
📜 Building a filterable menu that works for everyone - Adding an input to a menu is easy, making it accessible isn’t. Base UI explains its ARIA choices (dialog, not combobox), keyboard and submenu UX.
📜 Pure UI in the Agentic Era - Practical advice for reviewing agent-written UI: make components pure, pass state as explicit inputs, render every combination as a grid.
📦 React Router 8.5 - Deprecated view transition APIs, unstable API-only mode - Now recommends React 19.3’s <ViewTransition>, wrapped around an <Outlet>. The new API-only mode serves prerendered HTML from a CDN, while loaders and actions run on a server that can live on another origin.
📦 React Three Fiber 10.0 alpha 6 - WebGPU renderer by default, better React 19 support - The upcoming major now works with <Activity> and <ViewTransition>. StrictMode and Fast Refresh no longer rebuild the Canvas.
📦 Hydrogen 2026-10 - Shopify Hydrogen is now a library, not a framework. Bring Shopify commerce to your existing Next.js or React Router app, with skills for coding agents. Built-in WebMCP support.
📦 shadcn/ui - AI Elements, Trace and Code Block - 21 copy-paste patterns for agent UIs. They replace Vercel’s AI SDK Elements, which will be deprecated.
📦 Vinext 1.2 → 1.3 - 69% fewer JS requests per page, 5x faster cold starts, cache key collision fixes
📦 Mutative 2.0 - Faster updates, safer patches - Same API, 3.6x faster than Immer on their benchmarks, for a bigger bundle (7.9 vs 3.6 kB).
📦 Immer 11.2 - isModified() helper
📦 React Window 2.4 - Server rendering improvements
📦 Astryx RichText - Lexical-based rich text field with lossless Markdown
📦 React Bits 2.0 - 215 animated React components, rebuilt design tools
📦 c15t v3 - One consent engine for 8 frameworks, banner in the server HTML
📦 React Trees Playground - Paste React code, see its parent and owner trees

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📱 React-Native

React Native 0.88

The new release is out with one of the largest runtime changes in years! Events are now dispatched through the W3C EventTarget API by default. This is the same model as on the web, making it possible to share event handling code between web and native. This opens the path to web-compatible imperative APIs in the future. And yet, it’s a third release with no user-facing breaking changes, after 0.83 and 0.86.

Other key highlights include:

SceneDelegate on iOS - support for the UIScene lifecycle required by the iOS 27 SDK, added additively.
Variable fonts - fontVariationSettings on Text and TextInput, on Android and iOS, in object or CSS string form.
ArrayBuffer for Java TurboModules - binary data no longer needs base64 or number-array encoding, and synchronous calls can borrow JavaScript memory instead of copying it.
Swift Package Manager improvements - still experimental, but iOS versions now come from the app's deployment target, and Xcode builds no longer break for libraries shipping their own Package.swift. 0.89 targets SwiftPM as the default.

Expo SDK 58

A React Native release is not enough! Expo SDK 58 is out with React Native 0.88, built for iOS 27 and ready for iPhone Duo on day one, and it comes with a long list of improvements of its own. Too many to list them all, so here are the highlights:

Expo Modules 2.0 (beta) - plain Swift and Kotlin classes with annotations, with sync calls 2.5-5.6x faster than the DSL on iOS and faster than TurboModules in all twelve Android microbenchmarks.
Faster builds and faster modules - prebuilt expo-modules-core Android libraries cut a clean four-ABI debug build from about 80 seconds to about 39, and iOS calls passing long strings are up to 3.8x faster.
App Intents (alpha) - expo-app-intents exposes your app to Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight, and Apple Intelligence.
Expo UI and Android home screen widgets - lists recycle rows now, iOS gains NavigationStack and Toolbar, and expo-widgets runs on Android with its own Hermes runtime.
A CLI built for agents - the experimental @expo/agent-cli wraps Expo CLI, EAS CLI, and expo-doctor.
Expo Router - data loaders, SSR and middleware are now stable, alongside native tabs and a reworked navigation core.

And a few more: an experimental Rust transformer for roughly 2x faster cold bundling, SwiftPM groundwork for Expo apps, and Expo Observe gaining control over automatic error recording.

💸 DeployPulse - Hosted OTA updates for React Native. A drop-in replacement for CodePush and EAS Update.
💬 RFC - API removal strategy in React Native - Removed APIs like InteractionManager throw on access. This proposes alternatives so that library authors can more easily use feature detection to keep supporting older React Native versions.
📣 React Native Edge to Edge is now deprecated - RN 0.86+ ships the fixes natively: set edgeToEdgeEnabled=true in gradle.properties instead.
📜 Icons and iOS 27 updates in React Navigation 8 - Native tabs now accept custom SF Symbols and VectorDrawables. With Nano Icons, you can use SVG icons in native tabs without hurting performance. Also includes filled Material Symbols and the iOS 27 prominent tab.
📜 OpenIAP adds support for Amazon - react-native-iap and expo-iap can now sell on Fire OS and Vega OS with the same APIs.
📜 Relaunching TeamReach: how OTA updates saved a 5,000,000-user cutover
📜 Multi-Window React Native Apps With the Meta VR Layout SDK
📜 Control App Test Conditions With Appduct for AI QA Agents
💸 Maestro MCP - Let your coding agent write, run and debug your UI tests
📦 expo-device-hub - Your simulators and emulators in a browser tab - Also fixes the Expo CLI i shortcut, broken by Xcode 27 after the removal of Simulator.app.
📦 FastImage 10.0 - New Architecture rewrite, objectFit replaces resizeMode, objectPosition added - The original library is actively maintained again.
📦 Screens 4.30 - iPhone Duo support, opaque headers fixed on iOS 26+, prominentScreenKey for Tabs
📦 Gesture Handler 3.4 - iOS SPM support, immediatePressOut prop
📦 Bottom Sheet 0.17 - Scroll handoff with nested scrollables, percentage detents
📦 Uniwind 1.13 - CSS cascade order on native
📦 Nitro Fetch 1.9 - iOS WebSockets on Network.framework (~30% faster), built-in SSL pinning, Android perf fixes
📦 RN GPUI - Render React Native components natively with GPUI, Zed's Rust UI framework (macOS only)
📦 Better PDF 1.1 - Several files as one document, base64 sources, cheaper long documents
📦 Babel Plugin RN Direct Imports - Rewrite react-native barrel imports into direct module imports, so your bundle only includes the APIs you use
📦 Skia WebGPU Video 0.1 Beta - Video playback, composition and export for React Native Skia 3 and WebGPU
📦 Xcode 27.1 - Swift 6.4, iOS 27.1 SDKs, iPhone Duo support

🔀 Other

📣 Experimental soft navigation metrics now available in CrUX - Exciting news for SPA / client-side routing frameworks! Core Web Vitals takes into account soft navigations, measuring the full navigation session instead of only the initial page load, and the Chrome User Experience Report dataset now exposes these metrics as experimental. Use the CrUX Vis tool and check the “Include soft navigations” toggle to see the score impact on any site. The React site’s score is improving because subsequent navigations are faster than the initial page load.
🔐 PHP - Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities - These 2 “php2shell” RCEs look really bad: no login needed, affecting PHP since 5.4. Yes, that includes your WordPress and Laravel sites. Upgrade now!
📜 The Future of CSS - Josh Comeau’s top 10 picks for Interop 2027, nicely presented with browser support and interactive demos.
📜 JPEG XL vs AVIF for web use-cases - JPEG XL recently landed in all browsers. AVIF remains better for lossy compression, but JPEG XL wins for lossless compression and recompressing existing JPEGs.
📦 TypeScript 7.1 beta - New TypeScript API, Import Attributes in Ambient Modules, stable es2026 lib/target, performance improvements - The real highlight is the new TypeScript API, unlocking ecosystem tools such as TypeScript-ESLint to integrate with TypeScript 7. Content Mappers are a game changer for improving the type safety of external files such as MDX, Astro, CSS Modules, Vue, and more.
📦 tsrs - Rust port of the TypeScript 7 type checker and LSP - There have been a lot of TypeScript ports to Rust recently. The most promising one is already much faster than tsgo. It’s now supported by Cloudflare/VoidZero, incubating under the Oxc toolchain umbrella. Not a fork: they are actively collaborating with the TypeScript team and plan to keep it aligned with the reference implementation. The backstory is also interesting, and shows the port will also speed up Oxlint type-aware linting.
📦 Node.js 24.22 LTS - util.throttle() and util.debounce(), crypto improvements
📦 Rsdoctor 2.0 - Now Rspack-only, Agent CLI, 57% faster analysis, 56% smaller install, multi-compiler reports
📦 Webpack 5.112 - SSR asset manifest, source map scopes, multi-entry library exports, async DefinePlugin values
📦 Astro 7.4 - Build timings, separate build/runtime image services, parallel prerendering (experimental)

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #301 : TanStack Start, React Aria, Base UI, Next.js | RN Web, Tamagui, One, Skia | Deno, Bun, TS, JPEG XL

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:13:28 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

TanStack Start 1.0 is finally stable, a client-first alternative to server-first React frameworks.

On mobile, Expo will maintain React Native Web, under the React Foundation. Tamagui v3 and One v2 are out. React Native 0.88 is at RC5, so it should land very soon!

Deno is joining Cloudflare. JPEG XL lands in Chrome and Firefox. TypeScript is getting ported to Rust, twice.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

TanStack Start 1.0

The full-stack framework is officially stable and production-ready, supporting both React and Solid. It has already been used on millions of apps during its beta/RC phase. As its 𝕏 launch video puts it: "Feels like building a SPA. With the whole server behind you".

Client-first: SPA-style routing, state and caching, with server rendering, streaming and typed server functions.
Type-safe end to end: route params, search params, loader data and server function inputs are all typed, keeping changes consistent for both humans and agents. Type checking speed has been thoroughly optimized.
Agent-ready: packages ship TanStack Intent skills, so agents can learn Start's APIs and best practices.
RSC is opt-in: supported, but the team removed it from tanstack.com because it made the codebase harder to reason about.
Deploy anywhere with Vite and Nitro. Rsbuild is also supported.

💸 Lingui - React i18n macros now compile natively in Vite, 2.5x faster than SWC and nearly 30x faster than Babel
💬 React RFC - React work counters - Suggests improving the production observability of React by exposing metrics such as number of re-renders, setState calls or commits. I like the idea of giving metrics for agents to hill-climb and optimize against.
👀 MobX PR - MobX React plugin - An upcoming bundler plugin will help MobX and the React Compiler coexist. Wraps components in observer(), adds "use no memo" directives, turns async methods into MobX flows.
👀 Next.js PR - eslint-config-next supports ESLint 10 - eslint-plugin-react still doesn't support ESLint 10, so Next.js 16.5 canary patches it in place. Next.js users can finally upgrade.
🔐 Next.js - Upcoming security update - Planned for October 14: 2 critical and 1 high severity vulnerabilities in upstream dependencies.
📜 Can we Make React Faster using the React Compiler? - Explains what the compiler outputs, how it works, and then prototypes various optimizations: component inlining, Million.js-style blocks, Solid-like list selection, automatic context and Zustand selectors...
📜 className Considered Harmful - How design systems drift when components accept className, and how popular design systems restrict it. Why not a DANGEROUS_className prop 🤔.
📜 How we made a 9 MB WebAssembly module feel faster without removing a single byte - A chain of suspending components delayed the loading of a large WASM file. Preloading it made the first canvas render 15-19% faster.
📜 A visual notation for React's parent and owner trees - A diagram format for showing component structure, ownership, and context at a glance.
📜 Debugging Suspense with the React Suspense Panel - A practical tour of the new React DevTools 8.0 Suspense tab.
💸 Sentry - Stop scrubbing replays. Learn the sampling, filters, and React hooks that find the right session, live on Nov 5th. Save your spot
📦 React Aria 1.22 - New Sheet component, virtual-keyboard-aware overlays - The new swipeable Sheet component uses no JS touch handlers, only CSS scroll snapping and view timelines.
📦 Satori 0.36 → 0.55 - Converts JSX/HTML and CSS to SVG - Lots of releases this week, notably switching its layout engine from Yoga to Taffy, unlocking many new features like CSS grid and more.
📦 Vitest Plugin RSC 0.3 - Run Next.js App Router apps in Vitest Browser Mode - Lets you test the full RSC pipeline (server render, hydration, Server Actions) of a component or a whole route. Requires Next.js 16.4+.
📦 Base UI 1.9 - Filterable Menu, faster Select/Combobox/Menu, improved Drawer gestures
📦 Styled Components 6.6 - StyledComponent type for isolatedDeclarations, faster type-checking, RSC global styles fix
📦 React Hook Form 7.90 - Many bug fixes and perf improvements
📦 Astryx 0.7 - Easier form styling, better mobile and touch support, spacing in rem
📦 Vinext 1.1 - Next.js parity fixes, stale-while-revalidate for "use cache"
📦 Remocn Studio 1.0 - A macOS app where your coding agent makes Remotion videos
🎥 Ankita Kulkarni - Next.js 16.4 Is Built for Agents (Here's Why)
🎙️ This Month in React - September 2026 - React 19.3, a eulogy to software engineering?

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📱 React-Native

💸 PostHog - 10,000 PRs a month is easy: How devex is evolving at PostHog
👀 Expo to maintain React Native Web, moving to React Foundation
👀 RNTester moves to native UITabBarController for iPhone Duo support
📜 Your skills need an evaluation mechanism - Direct invocation doesn't prove discovery. Evals must test normal prompts and traces.
📜 Sharing a TypeScript Domain Layer Between Next.js and Expo - Share types, validation schemas and thin API client. Keep navigation, UI, storage and session handling app-local.
📜 You Don’t Need a Rewrite: Expo’s New Brownfield React Native Story - Brownfield has historically been hard, but things changed with Expo SDK 54. Covers myths vs. realities.
💸 Maestro MCP - Open-source MCP server for mobile UI testing with AI agents
📦 Skia 3.1 → 3.4 - New snapshot API, shared WebGPU instance via Dawn, tvOS and Mac Catalyst support
📦 RNTL 14.1 - fireEvent.layout, userEvent.pullToRefresh, userEvent.accessibilityAction, RN 0.88 support
📦 Tamagui 3 - New C++ native runtime, Rust compiler, Strict DOM, flat style props, Tailwind syntax
📦 One 2.0 - All-in-one RN framework, Bun for cross-platform, Rust bundler, SwiftUI and Compose generated
📦 Better PDF 1.0 - PDFKit and PdfRenderer, Native viewer on Nitro Views, no WebView or JS in scroll path - 91ms for 1,000 pages, 8x faster than react-native-pdf on large docs per author benchmark.
📦 Expo Native Variants - Generate Xcode schemes and Android flavors using an Expo config plugin in one prebuild
📦 WiFi Aware - Peer-to-peer discovery and high-bandwidth data over Wi-Fi Aware
📦 Hot Updater 1.0 - Shared release catalog, insights, remote config, plugins
📦 Sentry 8.30 - Cellular generation in connection type, Hermes Expo trace fixes
📦 Nano Icons 1.0 - Hot reload Metro plugin, native tab bar symbols, animatable size and color
📦 Screens 4.29 - iOS Tabs move to UITab API, search tab, sidebar placement, custom icons - Pairs well with Nano Icons.
📦 Argent 0.28 - iOS launch arguments, flows over a link, failed-step screenshots
📦 Expo Observe - Native crash reporting on Android and iOS, no setup, AI handoff
📦 Rozenite 2.5 - Lynx project detection, XHR-first network capture, Redux action filters, agent grammar v3
📦 Galeria 3.1 - Photo and video galleries on iOS, Android and web
🎥 Callstack - Ten Agents Waiting for Input: Tzvetan Mikov on AI Coding and Hermes
🎙️ RNR 375 - RNR Explains: EAS Update

🔀 Other

👀 HTML PR - AsyncContext integration - Still TC39 stage 2, this exciting feature is actively worked on, in particular its integration with web platform APIs.
📣 Deno is joining Cloudflare - The Deno team is joining to work on the Workers and toward making the Durable Objects programming model self-hostable. The Deno runtime and Deno Deploy will be sunset.
📜 The best way to use icons in Web UIs - Using icons as CSS design tokens, inserted and tweaked with pseudo-elements, masks, and style queries.
📜 Iframes that finally fit their content - Chrome 154 ships frame-sizing: content-height. Iframes can now adjust their size without the postMessage + ResizeObserver dance.
📜 JPEG XL finally lands in Chrome 155 and Firefox 158. Safari already has partial support.
📦 Bun 1.4.3 - bun check type checker, 67% lower idle CPU in servers, Bun.FetchSession, faster JSON.parse - Includes a port of typescript-go running 3-6x faster. No emit, no LSP. Coming next: 𝕏 bun lint with 1,000+ built-in rules and 𝕏 bun fmt, a 320x faster Prettier alternative.
📦 tsc-rs - Rust port of the TypeScript 7 compiler, type checker, and LSP - Theo’s agent-driven port of TS, with the Effect language service diagnostics built in.
📦 Playwright 1.64 - WebMCP testing APIs, better videos (custom fps, CSS-styled actions, VP9), --shuffle, locator.within()
📦 pnpm 12.11 → 12.13 - Agent skills linking, remote cache for task results and builds
📦 Partytown 1.0 - Run third-party scripts in a web worker, now stable
📦 Safari Technology Preview 254 - calc-size(), interpolate-size, CSS linked parameters, and more

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #300 : Next.js, TanStack, React Foundation | Skia, Live Activities, Lucent | TC39, e2e, Effect, Remix

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:35:17 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

Wow, 300 issues already! Time flies, and thanks for reading along 🙏

It's a big week, with major releases from the Next.js and TanStack teams. We also put the spotlight on recent React Foundation activity.

On mobile, Skia 3.0 is out! Shopify and Coinbase both recently announced moving away from React Native, a trend worth watching. Callstack officially launched an AI model specialized in React Native.

There are other exciting releases to dig into, including e2e, Effect v4, and Remix v3.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

Next.js 16.4

Cache Components are reaching maturity and are now recommended for every Next.js app. The new programming model is enabled by default in create-next-app, and will become the default in v17. Partial Prefetching is now considered part of the model.

Alongside this milestone, this release introduces:

Static guarantees: export const ensureStatic fails the build if dynamic content sneaks into a route.
Prefetching control: await navigation() excludes content from a prefetch.
Agent-guided upgrades and feedback.
React 19.3: stable View Transitions, Fragment Refs, browser() API.
Many DX, Turbopack, bundle size and React Compiler improvements.

TanStack Charts 1.0

The new TanStack charting library is officially stable. Small bundles, fast updates, composable, type-safe. Similar to other TanStack libraries, it comes with a framework-agnostic core and a React Adapter.

Speaking of TanStack, see also 𝕏 TanStack Markdown + Highlight 1.0: a tiny, fast Markdown renderer for docs and AI streams, with its companion syntax highlighter. Framework-agnostic, comes with a <Markdown> component.

React Foundation news

We haven’t heard much of the React Foundation since the launch of its website in June, but that is likely to change in light of recent activity:

🐦 Barbara Markiewicz joined the React Foundation as our Director of Community - Formerly at Callstack, she organized events such as React Conf and React Universe Conf.
📅 React Foundation Contributors Summit - 10–12 Nov 2026, London - A React Foundation gathering is scheduled next month at Meta's King's Cross office in London. Invite-only, but ecosystem contributors can self-apply.
📅 React Conf Ghana - 4–5 Nov 2026, Accra - As far as I know, it’s the first React conference officially organized by the React Foundation.

💸 Testing Frontend - Lessons from over a million lines of TypeScript at Palantir - Skip component tests and let Meticulous do the rest
👀 Next.js PR - unstable_paramMatching API - Configure matching separately from build-time prerenders
🔐 TanStack Start security update: CVE-2026-102989 - Fixing a 9.3 XSS vulnerability.
📜 Making React Context Cheap with React Compiler - How to work around the lack of context selectors in React in various ways. Benchmarking 5,000 <input type=”radio”> connected to the same state, showing that the React Compiler already achieves benefits similar to context selectors.
📜 React's New browser API: Rendering Components Only in the Browser
📦 Ink 8.0 - React CLI renderer - React 19.3+, scrollable Box views, any Node stream for stdio, many rendering fixes
📦 Streamdown 2.7 - AI Markdown streaming renderer - Faster, incremental code highlighting, block reuse, non-blocking Mermaid
📦 stableref 0.2 - Type-level referential stability for React/Preact - Export branded useSyncExternalStore
📦 Medula - Headless devtools for agents, based on Devframes, React and Next.js support
📦 Shaders - WebGPU effects as components for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and JavaScript
📦 Klipp - Camera toolkit for the web, comes with React Three Fiber bindings

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📱 React-Native

🎥 React Native Skia 3.0 - Hello Graphite

William Candillon just shipped the biggest release of React Native Skia to date!

Version 3.0 is rebuilt on Skia Graphite, Skia's new backend for modern GPU APIs. The old OpenGL-centric design came with stability and performance pains. Graphite fixes both. And because its design is symmetric with WebGPU, Skia and the rest of the web ecosystem can now run together on the same GPU.

Here's what that brings:

Multi-threading by default - A Skia drawing can be created on any dedicated thread. Only presenting the work runs on the UI thread.
Symmetric with WebGPU - React Native Skia and React Native WebGPU share the same WebGPU instance.
Zero-copy Three.js interop - A Three.js scene can be used as a regular Skia image with Skia effects on top, and Skia can draw onto Three.js scenes.
Video & camera on GPU - importExternalTexture brings video and camera feeds into Skia zero-copy, easy on the battery.
Lottie on WebGPU - Customizable Lottie animations, now with video imports.
Android platform work - An experimental CanvasView (API 29+) and view snapshotting over WebGPU.

The release is mostly backward compatible with v2, except for the system requirements: Android minSDK is now 26, and OpenGL is no longer supported (Vulkan only).

Shopify will keep sponsoring the project until the end of the year, despite migrating its apps away from React Native.

💸 PostHog - Why we rebuilt our data warehouse on DuckDB over ClickHouse
🐦 Coinbase is going native too - After last week’s announcement from Shopify, this time it’s Coinbase announcing it's migrating away from React Native. We have seen a few devs here and there reporting that today developing 2 native apps and keeping them in sync is becoming easier. Let’s see how this trend evolves!
📜 Why has Shopify dropped React Native? - A deep dive into the decision process about moving away from RN, and why migration to the New Architecture was not enough.
📜 Native views in TypeScript: SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose from Lucent - React Native renders through a host tree; Lucent compiles the JSX away entirely.
📜 Live Activities with Expo, End-to-End: Client and Backend - A missing manual on how to implement Live Activities, its gotchas, including backend.
📜 Introducing Mobile Dev: full mobile dev tooling right in your Codex app - An agent supervision tooling with Simulator, Instruments, logcat, and Metro, all in one place.
💸 Codemagic Patch - Self-hosted OTA updates, complete with fingerprinting, release metrics and online dashboard
📦 Stim Desktop 0.1 - Watch and steer your agents' React Native work: live devices, replay, logs, build cache stats
📦 Nitro Markdown 0.14 - RaTeX math rendering now optional dependency, RN 0.77 floor, streaming/StrictMode fixes
📦 Maestro CLI 2.11 - Android 17 support, video scrubbing fixes, YAML validation changes
📦 Unistyles 3.5.0 - Theme propagation fixes, reload memory leaks, frozen screens no longer blocking JS
📦 React Native Deploy - EAS-compatible builds on GitHub Actions runners, free for public repos
📦 React Native Enriched Markdown 1.1 - Notion-like input shortcuts, native video rendering, GitHub admonitions, nestable block quotes, numberOfLines, and more
📦 Sentry React Native 8.29 - Swift Package Manager integration
📦 Voltra 2.4 - Android improvements, native modifiers for SwiftUI and Jetpack Glance
📦 Baton - Relay GraphQL client for SwiftUI and Compose
📦 Screen Choreography 0.7 - Hybrid transition handoff, transition preparation overlay, .0
📦 Nitro Fetch 1.8 - Support request priority, support formData() for urlencoded Request/Responsed
🤖 Apex - Agentic coding model specialized in React - Now generally available - Callstack coding agent shines for React Native and Next.js development.
🎙️ RNR 374 - Building "Dreaming: Language Learning" with React Native

🔀 Other

👀 TypeScript 7.1 - Iteration Plan - Support for LSP, Content Mapper, Emit APIs, and more - The beta is delayed but should come out soon. This should unlock support for TS7 in TypeScript-ESLint.
👀 TC39 - 116th meeting outcome - JS proposals progressing include Composites, new Iterator methods, export defer, JSON parse options, and more.
📜 The Remix Way - Pragmatic feedback after rebuilding a personal blog and 10 other apps on Remix v3 over 6 months.
📜 Enforcing Best Practices with Jev as a Linter - Turns plain-English best practices into Oxlint rules using Jev.
📦 e2e - Next-generation agentic end-to-end testing framework for web and mobile apps - This lets you define actions and assertions in plain language, that you can interleave with more classic deterministic APIs. Model responses are cached so repeated runs are fast and inexpensive. The engine seems quite flexible, it can probably adapt to any UI. Interesting idea: it should help make tests more portable and less fragile, not relying on selectors or accessibility roles.
📦 Effect 4.0 - Fully rebuilt, dependency-free core, long-term support - Effect is gaining momentum as a way to make your TypeScript code more robust, providing additional guardrails for humans and AI agents. Up to 5x smaller bundles now make it even more compelling for client-side code. See also the now-official Effect Atom React bindings for state management.
📦 pnpm 12.9 & 12.10 - experimental 'loaded' linker, resolution settings in lockfile, StackBlitz WebContainers support, per-registry concurrency, faster caching, security fixes
📦 h3 2.0 - Minimal HTTP server framework for high performance, portability and composability
📦 SvelteKit 3.0 - Svelte meta-framework for rapidly developing robust, performant web applications
🎥 Remix Jam 2026 - Conference announcing the first stable release of Remix v3.

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #299 : Panda, Vinext, Next.js | Variable font, Activity Result, Lynx, Lucent, macOS | TC39, Composites

Sebastien Lorber — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:40:08 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week we have 2 major releases in the React ecosystem: Panda CSS v2 and Vinext v1.

On the mobile side, RN is getting support for variable font and Android Activity Result. Lynx v4 is out. Lucent is a new way to write native modules.

I’m particularly excited about the TC39 meeting happening right now. Many proposals progressed, including my favorite one: Composites moved to stage 2!

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

Panda CSS 2.0 - Same styling API, a new engine underneath

This new major version of the type-safe, build-time CSS-in-JS library is the biggest update since launch. Here’s what you need to know:

The CSS authoring experience doesn't change much.
The compiler has been rewritten in Rust on top of Oxc.
DX and builds get dramatically faster, and output better CSS.
With source transforms, Panda integrates with the bundler so that css(), style props, recipes and patterns are compiled to plain class strings at build time. The styling runtime disappears from your bundle, not just the style-insertion logic.
You get many new features to play with: a typography preset, publishing your Panda design system and visualize it in Studio, new CSS functions, a better CLI, an official ESLint plugin, and more

Vinext 1.0 - Next.js applications, powered by Vite

Cloudflare's Vite-based reimplementation of Next.js goes stable, supports both App and Pages Router and claims 99%+ compatibility with the Next.js test suite (minus Cache Components). They also have a different opinion of how ISR should work.

What started as a one-off slopfork experiment is now becoming an AI-driven software factory able to keep up with new features landing in the official Next.js implementation. Interesting time!

💸 PostHog - I wrote a 70x faster SQL parser while barely looking at the code
🔐 Next.js September Security - 16.3.8 and 15.5.27 - New security releases, covering 1 critical, 2 high, 5 medium vulnerabilities.
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📜 GitHub - Improving site performance by shipping more CSS - The multi-year story of an incremental migration from styled-components to CSS modules.
📜 Rebuilding React Router's Global Hooks in Next.js - Explains how Next.js and React Router chose to manage state differently. Next.js has no useNavigation() or useBlocker() but you can rebuild them with a Context provider.
📜 Props Are Not a Design System - Style props and Tailwind class walls are just inline styles in disguise. Use named variants and modifiers instead.
📜 How we made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks - Practical AI-driven perf work on a real React codebase. For example, their client-side app now renders a static composer so users can type before React even initializes. React commit counts, among many other metrics, serve as deterministic benchmarks for agents.
📜 AI, Open Source, and the Long Road to TanStack Charts - Recap of an X Space with Tanner Linsley. Not directly actionable, but interesting to see how he built a new charting library with AI in less than a week, reusing years of experience with Chart.js, react-charts, and Observable Plot.
📜 How to Sync a Design System with Claude Design
📦 Preact 11.0 - ESM-only, TS 5.1+, Hydration 2.0 with streaming SSR, refs as props, Object.is hook deps, React compat improvements - The first major in 6+ years, shipping necessary breaking changes to move the project forward.
📦 React Resizable Panels 4.14 - Grid layout components
📦 Redux Toolkit 2.13 - TypeScript 7 support, long list of bug fixes, new unified docs site
📦 Oxlint 1.86 - only-export-components now supports compound component, 2 React Compiler fixes
🎥 James Quick - Vinext 1.0 - A New Alternative to Next.js

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📱 React-Native

💸 DeployPulse - Hosted OTA updates for React Native. A drop-in replacement for CodePush and EAS Update.
📖 React Native docs - fontVariationSettings - Variable font support - RN 0.88 will support configuring variation axes of a variable font.
📜 React Native Modules Cannot Use Android's Activity Result API - Modules load after the Activity starts, so the modern API was unusable from native code. Fix is coming in RN 0.89. No manual setup of MainActivity steps needed.
📜 Shipping super-calendar - A story about building a performant solution for RN and web. Virtualized rendering of visible dates only, and Reanimated shared values to skip re-renders.
📜 5 react-native-enriched-html Use Cases You Might Not Know About - More than a rich text editor: text processing like the emoji picker runs fully native, avoiding JS-side FPS drops on low-end devices.
📜 Agentic CI for Expo apps with TesterArmy - Code output outpaced review capacity, so merges ship with low confidence. Testing like a real user using agents restores it.
💸 Maestro MCP - A practical guide to mobile UI testing with coding agents
📦 React Navigation 7.23 - Add tabBarRepeatedPressBehavior - Defines the behavior when pressing an already-focused tab. Can scroll content to top and/or pop nested stack screens.
📦 Lynx 4.0 - Foldables, Media Queries, Liquid Glass & Blur, WebView, ReactLynx improvements, Generative UI
📦 Lucent - Write native modules in TypeScript, compiled to C++ and called through JSI
📦 React Native macO 0.83
📦 Appduct - Expose app tools to agents and tests, no debug menus in the binary
📦 Nitro SQLite 10 - Independent database handles, reusable prepared statements, macOS support
📦 Legend List 3.6 - Add viewPositionFallback for oversized list items
📦 Angular Native - Build native iOS and Android apps with Angular, built and shipped with Expo
📦 Nitro RTMP - Live streaming as a VisionCamera 5 output
📦 Plain Text 0.9 - Faster, drop-in remplacement for Text component, proper hyphenation, writingDirection
📦 Re.Pack 5.4 - Lazy per-platform Rspack builds, unified commands entry point, RN 0.87 support
📦 ViroReact 3.0 - visionOS, Web AR, co-location multiplayer, Studio and MCP tooling
📦 Skia 2.13 - Legacy architecture support removed, android.surfaceType to select the backing view, SPM support
📦 Sentry 8.28 - Native breadcrumb off-switches, PII accessibility identifier opt-out, MetricKit raw payloads
📦 Legend List 3.5 - scrollElement to share an ancestor scrollbar on web, less layout work for single-column lists
📦 Argent 0.26 - iPhone Duo simulator support, clearer simulator-server exit errors, Xcode Device Hub for booted simulators
📦 Agent Device 0.21.15 - iOS 27 SDK and Xcode 27 support, visionOS simulators, richer Android accessibility snapshots

🔀 Other

🐦 TC39 meeting live updates - Progress for Composites, Iterator methods, export defer, and more - Among many other interesting JS proposals, my favorite one progressed! Composites are objects compared by value instead of identity, using interning. This is kind-of the “new version” of the former Records & Tuples proposal.
👀 WebSkills - A Huawei contributor recently pitched this at a W3C seminar, and W3C could incubate the project for a future standardization. Agent Skills, stored in the browser, running scripts in Web Worker sandboxes. Very early, but this could complete WebMCP and On-Device AI.
📜 Optimizing objects with null prototypes - Using null-prototype objects in hot paths can be a perf bottleneck for V8. Matteo works on Node.js WebStream optimisations, and just changing how those objects are created led to significant perf improvements.
📜 CSS linked parameters - One SVG, nine posters - Upcoming CSS feature to style an <img> SVG directly from the page CSS. Can be used today as a progressive enhancement.
📜 Electron to PWA: There and Back Again - PWA still can't deliver basic desktop app expectations.
📦 Vite+ 1.0 - A single vp command to manage your Node.js runtime, package manager, and frontend toolchain
📦 upm - A fast, tiny package manager for the npm registry - Written in TypeScript, yet as fast as Rust alternatives.
📦 Mock Service Worker 3.0 - Smaller, ESM-only, granular entrypoints, GraphQL subscriptions, Network API, socket-level Node.js interception - There’s also a new package to integrate with React Native.
📦 pnpm 12.7 - node shim follows .nvmrc, install --allow-build flag, wait for published packages to become available

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #298 : Astro, Redux, img, Hotkeys | Reanimated, Worklets, Helix, Screens, SecondaryRuntime | TC39, Node, pnpm

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:48:10 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week is rather quiet on the web side. Astro's React integration keeps ramping up. Redux is working on significant performance improvements for large apps.

On mobile, we still have a steady flow of interesting releases. Reanimated enabled its new layout engine by default. Shopify presented Helix, its internal tool to move away from RN. Xcode project format is finally moving to JSON!

We asked on 𝕏: do average devs still care about React? \
Thanks to everyone who answered our existential question! \
If fewer devs care about implementation details and React, what's the future of this newsletter? 🤷‍♂️ \
Reply by email and tell us how we can best serve you in this new AI-driven world.

Let's dive in!

💡 Subscribe to the official newsletter to receive an email every week!

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⚛️ React

👀 React docs - New <img> API ref page - The humble image component does more than just displaying images. It also generates preload hints during SSR by default, and integrates nicely with <ViewTransition> animations.
👀 React Flight PR - Server References for arbitrary object types - Experimental Flight protocol feature, enabling Server References to point to an object and not just a function.
🔐 Next.js 16.3.6 - Security Update - Fixing a critical remote code execution vulnerability for those using ImageResponse with the Node runtime with dynamic user-controlled SVG inputs.
🗓️ React Advanced London - 🇬🇧 London - 23 & 26 Oct. Last call for London's most in-depth React conference! Two days, 50+ advanced sessions, next to Big Ben. Don't miss it—get 10% off with code "TWIR.
📜 Do Frameworks Matter Anymore? - If LLMs are great at React but nobody reads the .tsx files anymore, why even use an abstraction? Will the industry stick with React forever, or is there room for platform primitives (Web Components) and new ideas (Remix 3)? Kinda related to my existential crisis. 😆
📜 React Activity: When A Render No Longer Guarantees an Effect - Blindly replacing conditional rendering with <Activity> can expose subtle bugs in legacy code relying on the render/Effect/cleanup sequence.
📜 Frontend for systems engineers - Explains React through familiar systems concepts
📦 Astro React 7.0 - Replaces Babel with Oxc, upgrades to Vite Plugin React v6 - It now has opt-in support for the React Compiler through Oxc experimental support.
📦 React Redux 9.4 alpha - useSignalSelector() hook, <SignalProvider> component, react-redux/signals entrypoint - Drop-in optimization for large apps with thousands of connected components. Opt-in, but +7kB gzip. A proxy tracks selector state access, so only affected selectors re-run on dispatch.
📦 Redact 0.1 - Add React 19.3 APIs, improve runtime compatibility, keep sync rendering contract- TanStack's lightweight, synchronous reimplementation of React is now on GitHub and ships its first minor.
📦 React Three Fiber 9.8 - Support for React 19.3, roots configured synchronously, Strict Mode fixed - For 3D enthusiasts, Poimandres also released Glyph, a GPU-first typography engine with R3F bindings.
📦 TanStack React Hotkeys 0.11 - Improved physical key support, recorder validation, conflict detection, cross-layout fixes
📦 React Simple Maps 5.0 - Composable SVG map charts for data visualization in React
📦 React Resizable Panels 4.13 - Deferred panel resizing, panel expand/collapse threshold
📦 react-zoom-pan-pinch 4.2 - Zooming, panning, pinching images and html elements, the easy way

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📱 React-Native

💸 build mode - How much can you delegate to agents?
👀 React Native RFC - Secondary JavaScript runtimes in React Native - Worklet maintainer requesting a first-class C++ API to create secondary Hermes runtimes. This should help make the integration with libraries such as Reanimated/Worklets more robust, address debugging/inspector/HMR pain points, and more.
📜 Shopify Helix - The internal tool powering our native migration - Agents are powerful, but getting consistent results is difficult. Their solution needed tooling and guardrails.
📜 Deep Dive into ReactLynx: From Background Rendering to Instant First-Frame Rendering - Start of the series to answer how Lynx runs React on two threads, enables IFR and Main Thread Script.
📜 The KMP-on-iOS Scaling Problem That Rust UniFFI Fixes - A follow-up to last week’s KMP post and its challenge of scaling on iOS and how Rust's UniFFI fixes it.
📜 React Native in an Industry That's Changing - A look into how working with agents changes the decision process on where to draw the line between native and cross-platform.
📜 What Does Shared Business Logic in Rust Look Like on iOS & Android?
📜 Exploring Jev for AI-Driven QA with agent-device
💸 Codemagic Patch - Self-hosted OTA updates, complete with fingerprinting, release metrics and online dashboard
📦 Xcode 27.2 beta - JSON project format .xcproj - A new JSON format that’s more human-readable, editable by coding agents, and merge-friendly. Already the default for new projects.
📦 Reanimated 4.7 - New layout animations engine by default, animated backgroundImage, more Android CSS transitions
📦 Worklets 0.13 - Networking module for Bundle Mode runtimes, OXC Babel plugin port, SPM support
📦 Screens 5.0 alpha 3 - Stack v5 header customization on Android and iOS, FormSheet stacking, SPM support
📦 Expo Infinite Media - Native paged media feed, AVFoundation on iOS, Media3 on Android
📦 Numeric Text - SwiftUI's numericText on iOS, frame-measured native renderer on Android
📦 Secure Webview - Explicit origin allowlists. Native navigation enforcement. Blocked redirects. Deep-link protection. Fail-closed by default. - Built for security-critical flows like payments, OAuth, authentication, and 3-D Secure.
📦 Screen Choreography 0.6 - Declarative Enter/Exit reveals, duration-based springs, interactive gesture lifecycle
📦 View Shot 6.0 - RN 0.80+ required, 0.87 Strict TypeScript API support, html2canvas-pro optional on web
📦 Nitro SQLite 9.8 - iOS Application Support storage, performance mode, thread safety
📦 Sentry 8.27 - Session Replay runtime controls, per-class masking, iOS hang workaround
📦 Test Renderer 1.3 - React 19.3 support
📦 Legend List 3.4 - Scroll readiness callback, end-following fixes, direction-aware row preparation
📦 Arrangement View 0.1 - Adaptive split/overlay panes and hinge observation for foldables, early iPhone Duo support, Android coming soon
📦 Skia Layout - Flexbox layouts for React Native Skia powered by Yoga
📦 Pulsar Studio - Visual editor for custom haptic patterns, timeline design, audio and Lottie generation
📦 Enriched Markdown iOS 0.3 - LaTeX math, spoilers, highlights, GitHub alerts, better VoiceOver
📦 Agent Device 0.21.12 - Foldable simulator posing, recording contact sheets, Maestro permissions
📦 Delacour UI - shadcn-style component kit for RN: Uniwind styling, Reanimated interaction, Pulsar haptics
🤖 Apex - Callstack's React Native coding model - Based on Gemma 4, fine-tuned with SFT + GRPO on curated RN ecosystem data. Will be launched soon.
🎥 Beto - What's new in Expo SDK 58
🎥 Expo - Introduction to agentic self-healing apps

🔀 Other

👀 TC39 - Agenda for the 116th meeting - Happening next Tuesday. Many Iterator proposals will likely progress to stage 4. I’m particularly excited to see if Composites will progress to stage 2!
📦 Chrome 154 - Responsive iframe resizing - Iframes can now resize themselves based on the size of their embedded document 🤯. Haven't all widget/extension authors dreamed of this for years, as an alternative to postMessage()?
📦 Edge 151-153 - My favorite newly-supported features are WebMCP (origin trial) and OpaqueRange to highlight in inputs/textarea (see my syntax-highlighted textarea demo).
📦 pnpm 12.6 - Automatic dedupe, automatic type installation, file:/link catalogs, and more - You may not need to run pnpm dedupe as part of your CI anymore! And wtf we had to figure out manually whether a lib has bundled types or is using DefinitelyTyped? Not anymore!
📦 Turborepo 2.11 - Native support for Rust/Python/Go, faster startup, nub/aube support - It’s interesting to see that both Turborepo and pnpm have become polyglot tools lately. Maybe the start of a new trend that AI now enables?
📦 Node.js 26.9- & 26.10 - Web Workers support, VFS improvements, enable ffi, add bench, debounce/throttle - Native support for throttle/debounce surprised me, RIP Lodash 😄
📦 jsdom 30.1 - Major performance, memory, and correctness improvements
📦 Rstest 0.12 - Playwright E2E testing, Module Federation testing, faster jsdom tests, new JS API
📦 tRPC 11.19 - Better request cancellation, TanStack Query skipToken fix
📦 ESLint 10.11 - Perf improvements: 20-25% faster initialization, faster rule execution

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #297 : DevTools, Motion, Apollo | Shopify, Expo 58 beta, ExecuTorch | pnpm, oj, Zod

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:04:01 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

Following the React v19.3 release, DevTools v8 is now officially published. Motion shipped a ViewTransition wrapper. React Router optimized re-renders. Apollo Client finally has custom scalars.

On mobile, we have a lot of releases. RN 0.88 will use React v19.3. Shopify is moving away from React Native!

Let's dive in!

💡 Subscribe to the official newsletter to receive an email every week!

💸 Sponsor

Live Workshop Series: Debugging AI Agents

Your agent returns something odd. Was it the prompt, a tool call that timed out, or output your code could not parse? Without traces, you are guessing.

On October 7, Serge from Sentry instruments three agents with Agent Tracing: a chatbot in an e-commerce store, a custom Slack agent, and a GitHub Action that reviews PRs. You'll see bad tool calls, unexpected output, and token spend per run.

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Both sessions are free. Register for the series.

⚛️ React

💸 build mode - 2030-shaped software
👀 React DevTools 8.0 on the Chrome Web Store - If you use Chrome, you probably got the new version automatically. You should now see a new Elements > ⚛️React Element pane when inspecting elements in Chrome DevTools, and also a new top-level ⚛️Suspense tab.
👀 StyleX RFC - Add compile-time CSS enums and exhaustive matching
📜 The Cost of Abstraction for Humans and AI Agents - The author created the same React app with different levels of abstraction, then measured the cost of editing each app with Sonnet 5. He estimates that an over-abstracted codebase costs 30% more in AI agent bill and time. Also includes 6 abstraction patterns often seen in React codebases that you can probably inline.
📜 React Server Functions Are More Than Mutations - An interactive exploration of using Server Functions for reads via HTTP QUERY, then streaming values, while working on an Effect-based RSC framework.
📜 SolidJS, It’s the Little Things - Walks through 6 small Solid 2.0 DX details, from isPending() to optimistic stores, each compared side by side with the React equivalent.
📜 Fixing INP in a Massive React Dropdown - Opening a MultiSelect with ~1,200 options mounted at once blocks the main thread. Since all rows share the same height, a custom 90-line virtualization hook is enough to bring INP from 1,256ms down to 96ms.
📜 TSRX - Removing lazy destructuring - Preparing for v1.0, TSRX dropped its &{} destructuring syntax. This reflects its positioning as a JSX extension, rather than a new language that humans and LLMs would have to learn.
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📦 Motion 13.4 - New <AnimateView> component - Wraps React's <ViewTransition>, adding support for spring support, dynamic targets, animation controls, and a simple props API. Interesting to see the lib pushing back on React docs' claims about View Transition performance compared to layout animations.
📦 shadcn lint - An agent-first linter for Tailwind design systems - Since className is just a string, design system rules are hard to enforce with types. This ESLint/Oxlint plugin lets you define per-component rules and emit actionable errors to guide your agents.
📦 Oxlint 1.83 - Update lint rules for React 19.3 - This fixes false-positive lint errors you may get by adopting React 19.3 features such as Fragment refs or newly supported DOM props.
📦 React Router 8.4 - Fewer re-renders, faster route matching (unstable) - The internal router state has been split into 4 contexts, so hooks like useLocation() will re-render less.
📦 Apollo Client 4.3 - Custom scalars, type-safety improvements - The GraphQL client finally ships built-in custom scalar support, its most requested feature: parse/serialize values like Date in one place
📦 React Hook Form 7.88 - Built-in <ErrorMessage> component - This lets you render one or many validation error messages for a given field.
📦 Astryx 0.6 - Responsive theme rules, adaptable selection, reworked Neutral palette

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Shopify is moving away from React Native to native

An unexpected announcement from Shopify shook the React Native ecosystem. They’re moving away from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin!

So what’s their reason? Not because RN failed, but because coding agents changed the economics. Building twice no longer costs twice.

They started with a 12-week case study to migrate their flagship Shop app to native with 6 engineers, leading to the following improvements:

improve startup time - iOS startup 3200ms → 2466ms (-23%), Android 4433ms → 2233ms (-50%)
session stability - 99.5% → 99.95% (10x reduction)
runtime performance on Android - 120 FPS on a Pixel device

It’s important to note that the app was 𝕏 not using the New Architecture, which was built to fix those problems.

Does it mean React Native is dead? Does not seem so. A shared application and UI layer remains useful, and React Native still has major benefits such as Over-The-Air updates and good foundations for server-driven UI, useful for the agentic era.

💸 Crisp - Customize your in-app support experience with our React Native SDK and flexible integration options
👀 React Native 0.88 RC.1 cherry-picked React 19.3 - Stable ViewTransition, Fragment refs, browser(), Trusted Types - This upgrade doesn’t look like a major change for RN devs on its own, but ViewTransitions and Fragment refs are React core features and may become supported on the RN side? 🤫
📜 You don't need a Mac to develop iOS apps anymore - EAS runs iOS simulators in the cloud, letting you test and build apps from any OS or browser. Android is also supported.
📜 Legend State: The Fastest React State Library You’re Probably Not Using - React's built-in state management can often be a source of performance problems. State managers such as Legend State help reduce re-renders thanks to observables.
📜 How Does KMP with SwiftUI Scale on iOS? - Sharing logic in Kotlin sounds ideal. The problem? iOS consumes one static framework. Does this cause a full rebuild on every change? Fortunately, no, but there's still a cost.
📜 Is Your App Ready for iPhone Duo? - A new mobile form factor is coming to iOS. Taking care of screen edges, safe areas, and adaptive layout is more important than ever.
📜 What It Actually Takes to Migrate Discord to React Native's New Architecture - Migrating a complex app to the New Architecture is not just a flip of a switch. There’s a long tail of issues and assumptions that need to be taken care of.
💸 Codemagic Patch - The easiest way to run your own OTA update server, complete with dashboard and fingerprinting
📦 ExecuTorch 0.10 - Ground-up rewrite, TS pipelines, Core ML/MLX/Vulkan acceleration - Orchestration moves to inspectable TypeScript with Core API for custom models without C++, worklets support for VisionCamera live streams, on-demand native binaries to trim bundle size, and a legacy entrypoint for gradual migration.
📦 Expo SDK 58 Beta - iOS 27 support, RN 0.88 RC, Expo Modules 2.0 beta, App Intents alpha, agent CLI, Android widgets, stable Expo Router data loaders and native tabs, and more - Another exciting Expo release that we’ll cover in depth once stable in 3-4 weeks!
📦 Screenmap - Visual navigation maps for Expo / React Native apps - A promising tool to add to your CI workflows: takes a screenshot of every app screen and posts a map to your mobile PRs, highlighting what has changed.
📦 Screens 4.28 - Android Tabs/Stack fixes, tab bar layout, and MenuItem IDs - Small bugfix release, but here’s a 𝕏 sneak peek of upcoming support for iPhone Duo
📦 Swift 6.4 - Swift Build is now the default in SPM. Improved language, Foundation, and standard library. Improved C++ and Java interoperability.
📦 Metro 0.87 - Scheme resolvers, babel-runtime resolution, Watcher memory cuts
📦 Nitro ZXing - Barcode scanner for VisionCamera written in C++, up to 10x faster than MLKit, and 2.6x faster for live camera frames
📦 Lynx 4.0 - AI docs for agents, generative UI using AI2UI renderer and OpenUI skill, dynamic elements, unified debug metadata, media queries
📦 WebGPU 0.10 - Chrome 154, SPM support, implicit device sync by default
📦 Gesture Handler 3.3 - Swipeable, Drawer, ScrollView and button press fixes
📦 Skia 2.12 - SPM support, handle invalid SVG parse results
📦 Boost 2.0 - Metro plugin replaces Babel, Animated/ActivityIndicator/StyleSheet/Platform optimizers, Uniwind support
📦 Screen Choreography 0.5 - defineTransition recipes, native forward preparation, live shared content
📦 Harness 1.5 - Windows platform support, harness ci commands, Metro config enhancer
📦 Voltra 2.3 - Server-driven Dynamic Widgets, configurable Android widgets, experimental Dynamic Live Activities
📦 Radon IDE 1.19 - Share booted devices with AI agents via Argent
📦 Argent 0.25 - WebView DOM in describe on Android, external device providers, script steps in flows
📦 Agent Device 0.21 - scroll-until finder, in-place iOS web sign-in, Maestro evalScript, 27–40% faster iOS opens, human takeover of remote sessions
📦 Stim 1.0 - Run several coding agents in parallel on RN apps, with build optimizations across worktrees
📦 Nitro Wakeword - On-device wake word detection for React Native, using the openWakeWord pipeline with ONNX Runtime
📦 Face Detector 2.1 - Auto-mode scaling fix for any frame/screen resolution
📦 Nitro Fetch 1.7 - Fix reject aborted requests when native finishes before cancel, multipart encoding, React Query/RTK examples
🎥 Code with Beto - How Marc Rousavy Turned Open Source Into a €20M+ Agency
🎙️ RNR 373 - Real Life React Native: Chime

🔀 Other

📜 De-phantoming the npm ecosystem - Using Nub to find phantom (undeclared) dependencies in the top 10k npm packages.
📜 New Things You Should Know About HTML Here in Mid 2026 - Good overview of modern HTML from Chris Coyier.
📦 pnpm 12.4 - Support for Rust and Python dependencies, new pnpm pipeline task runner - Bold move: pnpm expands beyond JS and can now install Cargo crates and PyPI packages alongside npm deps. The ability to run cached task graphs makes it a lightweight Turborepo/Nx alternative.
📦 Safari 27 - Fix top-level await, import defer, customizable <select>, ariaNotify(), CSS improvements, ReadableStream improvements, MCP server, JSPI, and more - Major release! The ES module loader has been entirely rewritten, fixing long-standing top-level await bugs. JSPI (JavaScript Promise Integration for WebAssembly) is now available in all major browsers: an important primitive letting synchronous code compiled to Wasm (C++, Rust…) call async JS APIs. You can now connect your AI agent to Safari through the new MCP server.
📦 Modern Web Types - TIL TypeScript only types DOM APIs shipped in 2+ browser engines. This lib lowers the threshold to 1 engine, letting you use the newest APIs as progressive enhancements without losing type-safety.
📦 oj - The Vite dev server reimplemented in Rust - This alternative offers different trade-offs. Will soon power the Lovable sandbox previews, resulting in 4x better memory usage and 2x faster cold starts.
📦 Devframe - Framework for building pluggable, extensible, and playful DevTools - It powers Vite DevTools and Nuxt DevTools v4, and there’s a Next.js DevTools prototype.
📦 Zod 4.6 - z.validate(), z.properties(), z.iban(), z.fromJSONSchema() improvements - The new z.validate() method fails fast, returns false on error, up to 35x faster than z.safeParse().
📦 Webpack 5.111 - Stable ESM output, output.copy for static files, CSS minimizer improvements

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #296: React 19.3, DevTools, Next.js, cn, Maps | 0.88 RC, Expo Modules, Navigation Benchmarks | Rslib, Vitest, gpu-lexer

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:29:09 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

We could feel it was coming, and here it is, ~~delaying~~ just in time for the newsletter! 😇

React 19.3 is finally out, with View Transitions and Fragment Refs stable! And it looks like updated DevTools are also coming soon.

We also got a sneak peek of React Native 0.88 and Expo Modules 2.0.

Let's dive in!

💡 Subscribe to the official newsletter to receive an email every week!

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⚛️ React

React 19.3

The new minor version of React is finally out, and it’s a great one!

If you read us regularly, we already disclosed everything 😇, but here’s a reminder of the highlights:

View Transitions: now stable! Also including the addTransitionType API that lets you customize the animation directly from the code triggering it.
Fragment Refs: now stable! This lets you get a ref of a <Fragment> and manipulate its underlying children DOM nodes. A quite useful feature unlocking new composition patterns that were previously difficult or requiring a wrapper DOM node.
use(browser()): a first-class API to opt out a subtree of server-side rendering, replacing patterns based on typeof window and useEffect.
Trusted Types: security feature to use in conjunction with Content-Security-Policy to prevent XSS attacks.
RSC can render <Context>: no need to create a wrapper <ContextProvider> component anymore.

Make sure to read that blog post because it contains interactive examples worth taking a look at, in particular to understand View Transitions and Fragment Refs.

💸 Sentry - How to wire a custom metric into a Next.js app, chart it, and alert on it. Learn how.
👀 React DevTools 8.0 - Suspense Tab enabled, React Element panel, remove Timeline profiler in favor of Performance tracks, display dimmed Activity subtree - The v8 changelog is already merged and gives a sneak peek. Not published yet on npm or extension stores.
👀 React DevTools CDT MCP - Speaking of DevTools, the React team is also experimenting with a new package, recently published to npm. It’s not an MCP server, but lets Chrome DevTools discover/register/expose React tools useful for agents to understand and profile your app at runtime.
👀 React.dev PR - Document missing SSR and hydration options - Adding the missing API ref documentation for SSR options such as formState, importMap, maxHeadersLength.
👀 Next.js PR - Upgrade web-vitals to v6 and report soft navigations - useReportWebVitals() will soon report SPA soft navigations, recently included in Core Web Vitals.
📜 React Now Rusted All The Way Out - An overview of the React Compiler in Rust landing in Vite, reporting a 17x speedup over the Babel version, and giving an alternative solution for React Router framework mode users.
📜 Replacing Next.js with a vibe-coded "framework" - Replacing Next.js on a personal site with a 5k-line framework Claude architected. Still React/MDX on the server, Preact islands on the client, with 99% less JS shipped. This shows meta-frameworks could eventually die out: their knowledge can be distilled into skills instead, and custom frameworks can be created on demand.
📜 Next.js - How Turbopack chunks your JavaScript - Explains the trade-offs behind code splitting strategies and the heuristics used to minimize both download size and request count. Next.js 16.3 comes with experimental options to optimize chunking and fine-tune heuristics based on your site access patterns.
📜 Next.js- How we closed 1,500 GitHub issues in one month - No React lesson here: they built an agent to analyze backlog issues to help maintainers close thousands of issues with confidence.
💸 Prepathon by Cloudways - Virtual Event - Sep 22 & 23 - Two days of sessions and hands-on activities on AI-assisted building, modern deployment, and what's actually working for developers shipping fast right now. Free to join from anywhere in the world. Register now to save your spot.
📦 React Google Maps 1.10 - New new 3d components - The library completed its existing Google Maps 3D support with declarative components for GLB models, HTML markers, polylines, polygons, terrain flattening, and circular paths. A demo is worth a thousand words, so check this 3D Maps Markers demo to see fancy 3D markers, including an animated Model3D Balloon.
📦 cn - A new engine for Tailwind class merging and conflict resolution - Claims to be 30x faster than tailwind-merge + clsx with the same APIs. Already integrated in shadcn 4.21. Use npx shadcn migrate cn to migrate. Faster, but 26 KB minified; can be reduced with cn build.
📦 Effective RSC - An experimental, Effect-native React Server Components framework for Bun - Ideas are worth taking a look at. RSC pages are Effect.fn() functions with Schema-decoded route params. Effect unlocks various benefits for RSCs, such as type-safe dependency injection and error handling, or request abortion propagation.
📦 Vidact - Compiles React code to direct DOM operations - In beta, supporting a growing subset of React 19. Components run only once when they mount.
📦 uf - Unified Toolchain for Flow and React - A Rust-based toolchain comparable to Vite+, improving DX for React and Flow. The author’s arguments are worth reading: Flow is a more precise type system than TypeScript for describing React code.
📦 DevJar 1.0 - React live code playgrounds - An interesting alternative to CodeSandbox to embed interactive React-based experiences on your site.
📦 Bamboo CSS - Zero-runtime CSS-in-JS - A Vite compiler erases the runtime, prunes unused tokens, and fails the build on invalid tokens.
📦 Base UI 1.8 - Improves mount perf for Menu/Popover, Combobox.createItems() API, Avatar lazy-loading
📦 Rsbuild Plugin React Router 0.6 - Support React Router 8 and its RSC mode
📦 Storybook 10.6 - TanStack / NextJS-Vite framework fixes, CLI bindings for agent tools/skills, performance improvements
📦 React Window 2.3 - New optional rowKey/columnKey props
📦 Jotai 3.0 - Modernized ESM-only package, removing deprecated APIs

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📱 React-Native

💸 build mode - Stop being the code review bottleneck
👀 RN 0.88 RC - SwiftPM tooling, DevTools screenshots, ArrayBuffer in TurboModules, Babel Platform inlining improvement, iOS SceneDelegate lifecycle - A sneak peek of the upcoming version from its changelog. Set up SwiftPM via npx react-native spm. Opt-in flags to drop legacy module/component interop will become the default later. Improved Platform.OS/select() inlining unlocks more platform-specific dead code elimination, around 𝕏 17.7KB on iOS and 19.6KB on Android.
📣 Expo Go - Login is now required to run projects - iOS-only for now. Will also be applied to Android later.
📊 React Native Navigation Benchmarks - Benchmarks the same app rebuilt 4x with different routers, covering cold start, RAM, FPS, and JS measurements. Android tests highlight the most common RN bottleneck.
📜 An early look at Expo Modules 2.0 - Modules become plain annotated Swift/Kotlin with no definition() DSL to learn. Sync calls run 2.5-5.6x faster than 1.0 on the same SDK and beat TurboModules in the Expo chart. Experimental, iOS-only. Android in progress.
💸 Codemagic Patch - The easiest way to run your own OTA update server, including dashboard and fingerprinting
📦 RN QuickJS alpha - Hermes-compatible JSI runtime - An alternative to Hermes. A tiny (~1.5MB) JavaScript engine that compiles to small bytecode bundles for faster startup, with a compatibility layer so most Hermes-dependent libs like Reanimated keep working without changes.
📦 Goldie - App Store screenshot generator for coding agents and humans - Useful framework-agnostic mobile tool. Argent replays flows; Goldie prepares store-compliant screenshots and preview videos.
📦 RN Continued Task - Background tasks that keep running after your app is backgrounded - One typed API over iOS 26 BGContinuedProcessingTask (Live Activity) + Android WorkManager foreground service, via Nitro. Useful for long-running user-initiated tasks like large exports, uploads, or encoding.
📦 Boost 1.7 - Image optimizer now default, RN 0.86 support
📦 Rozenite 2.4 - Auto-inject Lynx runtime, one endpoint for debug targets
📦 Sentry 8.25 - Feature flag info on native crashes, app.start vitals propagation
📦 Argent 0.24 - Physical iOS device support
📦 Uniwind 1.12 - Drop-shadow filter
📦 Streamdown 0.3 - Worklets 0.10 support
📦 Metro MCP 0.15 - MCP SDK v2, safer CDP reconnects pinned to same app, Hermes eval, Appium test gen
📦 Agent-Device 0.21 - Human takeovers in remote sessions, faster iOS Simulator opens, install size halved
📦 ReactLynx 0.126 - Now on Preact 11, 14% faster background renders, use() support
📦 Screen Choreography 0.4 - Shared-element transitions for Expo Router
🎙️ React Universe on Air - Running AI in the Browser With Transformers.js

🔀 Other

🗳️ Interop 2027 - Submit and vote for your favorite proposals
📜 Running zod Schemas on simdjson - Combining zod with ata, a JSON Schema engine using simdjson native core, and the benefits this brings.
📜 Half Past Fetch - await fetch() only waits for the headers, not the actual body, and other interesting details.
📜 Async Solid - 3-part series: reads, writes, and network
📦 gpu-lexer - Language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter - Crazy idea! Highlighting is not based on language grammars but on a small AI model trained for this purpose.
📦 Rslib 1.0 - Multiple output formats, multi-framework support, bundled or bundleless, style/asset support, and more - Looks like an interesting tool, in particular for publishing a component library across many frameworks.
📦 Vitest 5.0 - Perf improvements, vi.when, Trace View in Browser Mode, benchmarking API, better defaults, and more
📦 htmx 4.0 - fetch() replaces XHR, explicit inheritance, swaps all HTTP responses, and other breaking changes
📦 NestJS 12.0 - ESM-first, Rspack replacing webpack, Standard Schema validation, observability SDK
📦 Playwright 1.63 - Test locks, Locator improvements, aria/screen snapshots in traces, and more

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #295 : StyleX, browser(), Next.js, React Compiler | C++ API, Margelo, | Zod, pnpm, vgpu, Remix

Sebastien Lorber — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:25:50 +0000

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

Back from our summer break, we’ll cover news from the last two weeks.

React v19.3 is getting closer. The React Compiler in Rust is now available in Vite and Bun. CSS-in-JS is set to make a comeback.

On the mobile side, React Native keeps refining its public API surface, an important step toward v1.0. Callstack acquired Margelo.

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

StyleX, the atomic CSS-in-JS library from Meta, has been all the rage on X recently. This probably follows the 𝕏 Cursor migration from Tailwind to StyleX. Or maybe it’s related to Meta open-sourcing Astryx, the extensible, agent-friendly design system built on top and powering thousands of their apps for years.

Anyway, we already covered all that, so here are the recent resources to check out:

📜 Styling Linear for the future with StyleX - Linear completed its styled-components to StyleX migration. They don’t explicitly mention Tailwind but still highlight where StyleX does better: strong type-safe constraints, deterministic and performant merging of styles, styling-at-a-distance deliberately hard.
📜 A deep dive into StyleX - Hands-on introduction and opinionated conclusion: Tailwind’s terse syntax is better for humans, while StyleX's stronger constraints are better for agents.
📦 Tailwind-StyleX - Use Tailwind’s default design tokens directly in StyleX
🎙️ Syntax.fm - Why everyone is moving to Stylex?

💸 Lingui - New agent skills teach your AI agent to ship production-ready React i18n in one prompt
👀 React Types PR - Types for React 19.3 - We already had a hint of what’s coming in the last issue. This DefinitelyTyped PR is still a draft but cautiously confirms the upcoming highlights. A new React DOM browser() API is coming. <ViewTransition> and <Fragment ref> will be stable for React DOM usage, designed to be extended by other platform/renderers, with React Native support likely coming later.
📖 React DOM Docs - New use(browser(reason)) API - This new API coming in v19.3 lets you mark a component as browser-only during server rendering. Must be called from a Client Component, within a Suspense boundary. There’s also a new onBrowserBailout() server API introduced for reporting.
📖 How to Deploy a TanStack Start app to Vercel - TanStack and Vercel are teaming up to make Vercel a first-class home for TanStack Start, leveraging the Nitro Vite plugin.
🔐 Next.js August 2026 Security Release - v16.3.3 and v15.5.24 now available, fixing critical severity vulnerabilities.
🗓️ React Advanced London - 🇬🇧 London - 23 & 26 Oct. 40+ talks and 5+ hands-on workshops on modern React & AI tooling for React devs. A great place to catch up with the community - all inside London's historic ex-brewery. Save 10% on your ticket with code "TWIR".
📜 Making React Testing Library Tests 43% Faster - The story of using Codex to find performance gains in RTL getByRole() and landing fixes upstream in jsdom.
📜 SSG for React with Vite - Argues SSG should be the default over CSR and shows how to implement that with a tiny Vite plugin.
💸 build mode - We used context engineering to 5x conversion and 2x activation
📦 Vite Plugin React 6.1 - New {compiler: true} option to use the Oxc React Compiler - After landing in Oxlint, the faster Oxc Rust-based React Compiler comes to Vite through a new optional oxc-transform-react package. More than 10x faster than the Babel plugin!
📦 Bun 1.4 - The Rust rewrite is ready, alongside so many other things that the blog post probably takes hours to read, so we’ll focus on the React-related updates only. Built-in support for the React Compiler in Rust. A new Bun.markdown.react() turns Markdown into a React Element, supporting component substitution. Node.js compatibility improvements, Next.js 16 compatibility, reduced memory usage.
📦 Formisch 1.0 - Schema-first, framework-agnostic form library - The form library coming from the Valibot ecosystem supports React and React Native. Includes migration guides from React Hook Form, Formik, and TanStack Form.
📦 TanStack Query 5.102 - Simplify Query Methods - An important release for TanStack Query that finally implemented its RFC to merge 6 former imperative query methods under only 2 unified APIs: query() and infiniteQuery().
📦 GPUIX - React renderer for Zed’s GPUI - A new performant alternative to Electron with no WebView to build GPU-accelerated desktop apps.
📦 Satori 0.29+ - corner-shape, backdrop-filter, HarfBuzz text shaping, and more - This popular tool widely used to generate OpenGraph images received many interesting updates lately, soon available in Next.js ImageResponse API.
📦 React Aria 1.21 - NavigationTree component, Menu async loading
📦 Astryx 0.5 - 30 locales, one Escape key, and bottom sheets in core
📦 Waku 1.0 RC - Public API fixed, type-safe and instant navigation
📦 TanStack Charts 0.16 - Officially in alpha, ready to be field-tested
📦 Nuqs 2.10 - The React SPA adapter is now SSR-compatible for Astro, Inertia, Fastify
📦 Fumapress 1.0 - Waku-based content site generator
📦 React Input Format & Mask 1.0 - Hook/component for building formatted/masked inputs
📦 React Hook Form 7.86 & 7.87 - Typesafe getErrors(), trigger shouldTouch, opaque type registry
🎙️ This Month in React - Release candidate season; is that an asteroid hitting web educators?

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📱 React-Native

React Native RFC - Reducing the C/C++ public API

React Native 1.0 is still on the horizon, but to respect Semantic Versioning, it first needs to clearly define its public API surface. Following the work on stable JS/TS and Java/Kotlin APIs, it’s now the turn of the C++ APIs to be clarified.

Until now, there has been no clear distinction between public and private C++ APIs. As a result, community libraries and frameworks sometimes depend on APIs that were never intended to be public. This can cause libraries to break when upgrading React Native, or force the core team to preserve backward compatibility for internal APIs to avoid breaking the ecosystem.

This RFC introduces a new three-tier visibility model for C++ APIs:

Public: Stable within major versions, safe for libraries to depend on, and exposed through a single umbrella header.
Framework: Stable within minor versions. Regular usage emits a suppressible warning.
Private: No stability guarantees. Regular usage emits a suppressible error.

There’s existing tooling to take a snapshot of existing C++ APIs, that it will be adapted to take into accoun this new visibility model. All this will greatly help stabilize the C++ APIs and ensure React Native doesn’t ship unintended breaking changes.

Work is already in progress to apply this visibility model to all C++ APIs. This will be rolled out gradually, first opt-in through a RN_STRICT_API build flag, then opt-out after a grace period, giving time for the public API consumers to migrate to the new umbrella headers. Most APIs have already been categorized, so if your library depends on private or framework APIs, now is probably a good time to chime in.

💸 Crisp - React Native chat SDK with TypeScript, push notifications, event listeners and Helpdesk integration
📣 Margelo Joins Callstack to Advance High-Performance React Native Engineering - 2 major and complementary React Native consulting companies joining forces. Congrats to Mike, Marc, and all others.
📣 EAS Observe - Performance monitoring for Expo apps, now generally available
📣 OpenIAP - Now backed by Amazon Developer, bringing IAP to Fire OS and Vega OS
👀 React Native PR - ResizeObserver - A Web API spec-compliant implementation has been recently merged, but still behind a flag. More capable than onLayout.
📖 The React Native Developer's Security Guide - How to secure the developer's workstation, toolchain, repository, and CI.
🗓️ React Native Connection - 🇫🇷 Paris - 24 Sept. Last call to grab your ticket and join the React Native community in Paris! Get a 15% discount with code "TWIR".
📜 Speeding up Expensify's networking with NitroFetch - Prefetching on the native side, before the JS bundle is even loaded, reduced startup time by at least 15%.
📜 Building a 3D AI assistant using React Native and GPT-Realtime - How to use react-native-filament to render 3D characters and sync its animations with AI responses.
📜 Pasting images into TextInput should not be this hard - Pasting an image into a chat input is surprisingly hard. Wrapping TextInput turned out to be the best decision to avoid reimplementing well-known behaviors and APIs.
📜 Gesture Handler's Touchable: The Button We Wish We Had Sooner - The old nice button components are deprecated and replaced with the new Touchable component. Per-state scale, opacity, and underlay with custom transition times. Hover support on mobile via mouse and pencil, all without writing a single animation.
📜 Working With the React Native Super App Showcase Repository - How to work with super apps with non-trivial examples. App lifecycle, federation setup, monorepo management.
📜 React Native Bridgeless, race conditions with concurrent JS runtimes - New Architecture changes how a reload instantiates a new runtime when doing an OTA update. This caused the query to run on the wrong thread, resulting in a crash.
💸 ConfigCat - Run A/B Tests in React Native Apps with Feature Flags and Amplitude
📦 GTKX - React Navigation on Linux rendered by native libadwaita widgets - The platform-agnostic core of React Navigation now renders to GNOME. Interesting signal for where navigation abstractions can go.
📦 Reanimated 4.6 - CSS lifecycle callbacks on native, contrastColor, RN 0.87 support
📦 Teleport 1.2 - Fast reparenting on Android, no more empty frames
📦 Nitro 0.37 - Props move into core via C++ templates, immutable View prop snapshots
📦 Screen Transitions 4.0 - React 19.2 Activity, Reanimated 4, and a v3 migration guide
📦 Maestro CLI 2.9 - Test light and dark mode in one flow, Android WebView inspection
📦 Uniwind 1.11 - Filter support on iOS and RN 0.87, scoped variables
📦 Argent 0.21 - Shake tool for simulators and emulators, profiler fixes
📦 Rozenite 2.3 - Lynx support, agent tooling, and plugin testing utilities
📦 Agent Device 0.20.10 - AI SDK and MCP integrations, improved iOS snapshots, better Android visibility and gestures, Web hover automation
📦 Nitro MLX 0.6 - Turn-scoped inference on iOS, simplify agent chat experience, normalize LLM generation outcomes, configurable TTS
🤖 Expo Cloud Simulators - Agents that reproduce TestFlight feedback, fix bugs, and open PRs
🤖 Dactyl - Vibe coding platform for native apps that simulates SwiftUI in your browser
🎙️ RNR 371 - PanResponder and the anatomy of RN gestures
🎙️ RNR 372 - Looking back on Chain React 2026

🔀 Other

👀 CSS - Class Prefix Selector - Not implemented anywhere yet, but CSS will support .prefix-* selectors, letting you target multiple CSS classes at once.
👀 HTML Spec PR - Out-of-order streaming - This exciting feature is already in Chrome/Edge and has been
📦 pnpm 12.0 - Rust rewrite, project-aware global bins, registry revisions, and more - The upgrade from v11 seems easy, leading to significantly faster installs.
📦 Zod 4.5 - Ahead-of-time schema compilation, method memoization, new parsing features - Precompiled schemas parse 3-9x faster. Significant schema memory footprint improvements!
📦 vgpu - WebGPU library, designed for agents - The creative library Vercel developed to ship performant shaders. Agents can verify their work with a CLI, even in sandboxes without a GPU.
📦 Remix 3.0 RC - Full-stack, single dependency, composable JS framework based on web primitives - I t’s time for the team to freeze feature development and commit to SemVer.
📦 Rspack 2.2 - Performance, HMR and import.meta improvements, Browserslist Baseline targets
📦 Webpack 5.110 - Performance Hints, built-in CSS/HTML minification, native CSS recommended
📦 Node.js 26.8 - Built-in ZIP archive support, REPL inline syntax highlighting
📦 Jest 30.5 - whenCalledWith(), describe-level retries, new file watcher, perf and ESM fixes

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋

This Week In React #294: React Compiler, TanStack, Next.js, GTKX, Effect | RN 0.87, Screens, RNGH, Worklets, Skia | Node, Astro, pnpm

Sebastien Lorber — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:39:45 +0000

Hi everyone!

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here!

Back after a little break to cover news from the last two weeks. A lot is going on, apparently not everyone is on holiday because we still have many interesting releases, including many RCs from upcoming major versions.

The native React Compiler rollout continues. React v19.3 seems around the corner. Plenty of TanStack Router/Start and Next.js content.

React Native 0.87 is now out, paving the way for v1.0.

🏝️ We’ll be taking another break next week. See you in September. 👋

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💸 Sponsor

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Read the post →

⚛️ React

The React Compiler rollout

The rollout of the Rust-based compiler continues:

Oxlint 1.79 just added support. The new oxc-transform-react package also unlocks automatic memoization and will soon be supported in @vitejs/plugin-react (PR already merged). Along the way, they made many improvements to performance and behavior over the original Rust port and even found bugs in the Babel version.
Biome 2.5.8 is out with a new useReactCompiler nursery/experimental rule, although it’s an initial version and there’s remaining work to be done such as splitting the rule into many smaller ones.
Bun 1.4 will include React Compiler support through --react-compiler and Bun.build({reactCompiler: true}).

💸 build mode - Why we're bullish on loops
👀 React PR - Enable parallel transitions flag everywhere - Parallel transitions are already used in production at Meta, and are likely to come in v19.3 for both React and React Native.
👀 TanStack Router reimplemented - Prominent Node.js contributor Yagiz Nizipli reimplemented TanStack Router APIs, claiming a drop-in replacement up to 19x faster. Tanner Linsley answers.
💬 Next.js team - Ask us anything on Reddit and Ask us anything on X- Apart from the many Next.js-related discussions, happy to hear that Fragment refs and ViewTransition will be stable in React 19.3! Also gives a preview of upcoming features such as granular prerendering and new data fetching primitives.
💬 React Router - Changes planned for v9 - This discussion will keep track of what’s coming in the next major, scheduled for mid-2027.
🐦 Cursor completed its migration from Solid (v1) to React and StyleX - In practice, signal-based approaches created perf footguns. Their new product “Bot” forbids the direct usage of useEffect.
🗓️ React Summit US - 🇺🇸 New York - 17 & 20 Nov. Incredible lineup announced featuring Kent C. Dodds, Shaundai Person, Ken Wheeler, Tanner Linsley, and Seth Webster! Get a 10% discount with code "TWIR".
📜 Impersonating the DOM - A quite interesting lib design technique used by React Aria. createPortal(children, fakeDocument) lets you eavesdrop on the reconciler operations and get access to the rendered children. This pattern lets you do various things, such as hoisting/deduplicating SVG <defs>.
📜 How Lovable.dev moved from Next.js to TanStack Start - Lovable builds and hosts primarily TanStack Start apps, so they decided to adopt the framework for their flagship app to dogfood their own platform and turn it into a typical Lovable app. This describes the incremental migration approach: making the code framework-agnostic, using agents, migrating related routes together, and ensuring both frameworks can run simultaneously. The migration brought better DX/AX and simpler abstractions, but TanStack Start requires more bundler customization.
📜 Making Navigations Instant in v0 - Next.js 16.3 now supports pre-rendering dynamic content at runtime, making navigation feel instantaneous. Assert this behavior with a new Playwright instant() helper, and let your AI agents fix the failing tests with the provided skill.
📜 Reliable Query Prefetching with TanStack Router - Reliable prefetching requires using the same query options in the route loader prefetches and component queries, which may diverge at scale. Put query options in Route Context to keep them in sync.
📜 Inside a TanStack Router Navigation - Explains the lifecycle of a navigation and how edge cases are handled, such as using a transaction and private lane system to handle race conditions.
📜 Building App-like Experiences with Next.js 16.3 - A nice overview of all the cutting-edge Next.js features useful to build modern web apps, illustrated through 4 open source app demos.
📜 Coordinating Optimistic Updates in Next.js - Use useActionState and useOptimistic to coordinate overlapping transitions with an Action queue, a reducer, and optimistic state with automatic rollbacks. Not so easy to wire, but this pattern can be learned once and applied in many places.
📜 Using next/root-params in Next.js 16.3 - A game-changer for next-intl, that can now read a [locale] param of a root layout in all Server Components.
💸 TrustedRouter - Add every AI model to your React app through one OpenAI-compatible API with automatic failover and no prompt or output logs
📦 OXC for TSRX - Parse, lint, format .tsrx files with Oxc - This promising spiritual successor to JSX now has a fast Rust-based toolchain.
📦 GTKX 1.0 - The React framework for Linux, declarative layer on top of GTK4
📦 Unhead 3.3 - Framework-agnostic <head> component - Support <Fragment>, various React fixes
📦 Astryx 0.3 & 0.4 - Meta’s fully customizable design system based on StyleX
📦 React-Hook-Form 7.85 - Support React <Activity>
📦 shadcn React 0.3 - New <Questionnaire> component for multi-step question flows
📦 Fig - A small TypeScript UI runtime based on React Fiber.
📦 Rshono - Minimalist web framework based on Hono, Rspack and React Server Components
📦 Sugar High 2.0 - Lightweight, composable syntax highlighter with React bindings
📦 TanStack Form 2.0 alpha - Redesigned APIs, new validation pipeline, performance and type-safety improvements
📦 Preact 11.0 RC - use(), createPortal(), useEffectEvent(), and more
📦 Humid 1.0 - React server-side rendering in Rails using V8 / mini_racer
🎥 Lucas Barake - The state library that made me drop Zustand - Effect v4 is now in RC, comes with a reactive Atom implementation including first-class React bindings.
🎙️ This Month in React - July 2026 - React-alikes, governance, and state management

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Join Agent Conf in Warsaw on September 17–18 to get better at coding with AI agents.

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📱 React-Native

React Native 0.87

Like clockwork, React Native 0.87 is out! It's the biggest step towards RN 1.0 in a long time, coming with intentional breaking changes, so it deserves more than a routine upgrade note.

Strict TypeScript API by default: Types are generated automatically from source and scoped to the package's root, so internal file changes are no longer breaking changes. Dedicated *Instance types (e.g. ViewInstance, TextInputInstance) improve ref typing of built-in components, and doc comments now flow straight into your IDE. Alex Hunt goes into detail about the work that went into this: compatibility fixes for Tailwind, Uniwind, and Expo Web, plus an upstream TypeScript fix for hidden Libraries/ subpaths.
Faster, leaner Metro: Source map generation is now 2x faster and uses half of the memory. Support for TypeScript and ESM config files. Experimental Swift Package Manager support for iOS: Opt-in and additive: Xcode is enough — no Ruby, no Bundler, no CocoaPods. CocoaPods remains the default path.
Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) v9: First RN release to support AGP 9, with recommended opt-outs for built-in Kotlin and the new DSL until AGP 10.x.
API surface cleanup: Many deprecated APIs have been removed, including flagship ones like InteractionManager. New APIs are marked as deprecated and scheduled to be removed later. AbortController is now complete and backgroundImage: linear-gradient/radial-gradient is now stable.
New requirements: The minimum toolchain requirements is now Node.js 22, AGP 9, and Kotlin 2.0+.

💸 Crisp - Add in-app customer support to your React Native or Expo app in just a few lines of code
📖 RN docs - Strict TypeScript API guide updated for 0.87: ref types, setup-env, FAQs
🗓️ React Native Connection - 🇫🇷 Paris - 24 Sept. Deep dive into mobile development with top-tier experts from Expo, Software Mansion and Callstack. Regular ticket window closing August 31. Save 15% on your ticket with code "TWIR".
📜 Fitting RAG in Your Pocket: Local Retrieval in React Native - How to build on-device data retrieval for your apps using @react-native-ai/llama and native vector search with nitro-sqlite + sqlite-vec
📜 The Memory Hermes Can't See: Stale Shadow Nodes in React Native - Recent Hermes V1 memory regression triggered additional experiments that surfaced a fascinating finding about the Shadow Tree. Unmounting views causes the React component and the objects attached to it to still exist in memory, which can only be cleaned up by GC run.
📜 How we raised mobile end-to-end test stability to 98% - Shopify stopped patching their Appium E2E suite to fix flaky tests with an opinionated wrapper. They moved away from testing implementation details with TestIDs to using computer vision.
📜 How to build a resilient activity tracker with Expo - Build an Expo app with sessions that survive backgrounding, app kills, and crashes.
📜 Scanning Barcodes in React Native Apps: The Complete Guide (2026)
📜 Fable 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol: I spent $2,000 and 2 billion tokens to find out who wins
📜 Haptic Feedback on the Web: Why the Web Deliberately Refuses to Be as Tactile as Native Apps
💸 ConfigCat - Release React Native Features with Feature Flags, Without Redeploying
📦 Firebase 26 - New architecture foundation: TurboModules, TypeScript parity, modular API
📦 Skia 2.11 - Updates Skia engine, drive multiple animated props from one shared value
📦 Rozenite 2.1 - Unified plugin UI, feature flags plugin, agent skills CLI
📦 Sentry 8.23 - Swift pod migration - Action required for RN < 0.75, use_modular_headers! is required in the Podfile now that RNSentry ships Swift
📦 Screens 4.27 - RN 0.87 support, experimental ScrollToTopGuard
📦 Maestro 2.8 - Swipe from a point inside an element, variables in permissions, screenshot tresholds, and Maestro Cloud improvements
📦 Enriched Markdown 1.0 - First stable release: block-editing input pipeline, iOS SwiftUI renderer
📦 Pager View 9.0 - Replaces legacy pager implementation with Jetpack Compose on Android
📦 Gesture Handler 3.2 - Pressable on Touchable, hover callbacks, Strict TS API, AGP 9
📦 Worklets 0.12 - WeakRef on worklet runtimes, Bundle Mode loading on par with RN, enableLocking option
📦 Nitro Fetch 1.6 - tvOS support, shared iOS URLCache, prefetch cache fixes
📦 Expo Pretext 1.2 - Fixes Android module that never compiled, web font measurement fix
📦 Argent 0.20 - Concurrent flow recordings, Chromium per launch step, MCP registry, .env secrets
📦 Safe Area Context 5.9 - AGP 9 support, web resize/inset fixes
🤖 Expo Tuft - Higher-order agent reachable from Slack/iMessage, runs on an always-on machine - Technical preview of a new Expo AI product.
🤖 MargeloChat - Open-source ChatGPT-style RN AI chat app with RAG and streaming
🤖 iOS Simulator MCP 2.1 - App lifecycle tools: terminate_app, open_url, list_apps
🎥 Callstack - Can a Specialized Model Beat Frontier Models at React Native?
🎙️ RNR 369 - AppRegistry Explained - Breaks down RN’s AppRegistry. What’s under the hood. From Expo and app entry points to brownfield apps and more.
🎙️ RNR 370 - CopilotKit with Mike Ryan - Bringing AI agents to RN apps. Breaks down of AG-UI, generative UI, shared state, and the guardrails needed for trustworthy experiences.

🔀 Other

📜 CSS: the bomb inside your inbox - Novel hacking techniques showing how CSS sanitizers in Gmail/Outlook/Fastmail can be worked around to steal tokens, hijack clicks, or keylog passwords.
📜 How Variable Mangling Works in Oxc Minifier - Replacing original variable names with shorter ones with a slot assignment algorithm.
📦 Node.js 26.7 - Perfetto tracing support
📦 Astro 7.2 - Incremental static builds, opt out of session support
📦 pnpm 12.0 RC - pnpm 12 has been rewritten in Rust and should be easy to adopt, apart from 5 things that differ.
📦 Vitest 5.0 RC - Clear mocks by default, fake timers now mock Temporal, and more - Stable version expected in 2-3 weeks, check the full v5 migration guide.
📦 Solid 2.0 RC - First-class async support, new Rust-based compiler toolchain, simpler API surface
📦 SvelteKit 3.0 RC - Vite 8 + Rolldown, error boundaries, validated env vars, remote functions

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋