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Discussion on: Effects are not lifecycles

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samsch_org profile image
Samuel Scheiderich

Hey Abdisalan,

The value of useEffect is in the guarantees it makes around being a safe place to do side effects. Render can be called in cases where the component didn't render, and generally React is built around an assumption that you won't do side effects there.

Consider that you don't even have the option to optimize this way with lifecycles either. If you want to do something conditionally based on state after some renders with a class component, you do it in componentDidUpdate by testing those state values. But componentDidUpdate always runs.

Part of the mindset shift is to not think about these "when" conditions for your semantic code, and to instead model the state explicitly. If something shouldn't run for every render, then it should run conditionally based on some state. The deps array shouldn't be needed for that.

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abdisalan_js profile image
Abdisalan

You're right, in some cases you probably couldn't get away with putting side effects outside of the useEffect. However, using the second argument is still a powerful tool that should be used and doesn't mean you are "incorrectly coding functionality"