Hot news from React Conf 2024 - React 19 RC!

React Conf 2024 is ongoing!

When React Conf 2024 started yesterday (15.05.2024), the keynote already gave a cool summary of what we as developers will gain when using the new major React version. Since this keynote, React 19 officially changed its state from beta to RC. 🎉

Future of React

If you now think, why or when should I start using React 19 and the more interesting question, is it worth starting to use it? Will React still be there when my app has grown up in some years? From my personal point of view - YES. But there are also some facts not to be ignored:

• React npm downloads have grown over the years constantly and reached an amazing number of over 1 billion downloads in 2023
• a StackOverflow survey pointed out that 40% of the devs are using React
• and the community is still growing a lot: 36% of people learning to code do that by using React

But what’s new in React 19?

I haven’t written about React 19 in my blog until now. I will not repeat what you can find detailed in the React 19 blog post for some weeks. But let me give you bullet points:

• React 19 is now RC and will be released in a few weeks
• Server-side rendering is supported
• Suspense API extended
• Improved Hydration
• Introduced Actions
• ref is now a prop, you no longer need to use forwardRef
• There is a new react-compiler, which integrates into your bundler and does magic optimizations of components and hooks
  • Auto-memoization, you no longer need to use memo, useMemo, or useCallback)
  • Great performance optimizations, even for existing React code
  • There are also babel & eslint plugins for the compiler to get first-class hints and improvement suggestions right from that compiler

Be prepared for React 19

The big question is: do I need to change anything when migrating from React 18 to React 19? There is a little migration guide but most breaking changes are related to the usage of hooks and components which are already deprecated since years. So if you already take of warnings and get rid of them there shoud not be much work if there will be any at all.

Please don’t forget to keep on following the rules of React

Let’s see what the React Conf 2024 bings up today…