react-fiber-architecture VS styled-components

Here is great documentation for you to follow if you are interested in understanding the core concepts.

Can someone remind me why virtual DOM was/is desirable in the first place and why updating the DOM directly is desirable now?

If I understand correctly react elements are created in memory, and only upon "render" it is turned into the actual DOM. Supposedly manipulating the actual DOM is "heavy" hence delay/pruning the virtual DOM tree first then rendering would be beneficial? Then why is it working with DOM directly is desirable? And am I right to assume that "without virtual DOM" means work with DOM directly? Someone in the comment mention that Svelte is without vDOM already. Is there some design document that I can refer to, like the reconciliation engine used in react https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture

Перевод статьи Эндрю Кларка “React Fiber Architecture” https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture

Over the years, new view libraries that are even more performant than React have emerged. React may not be the fastest library out there, but in terms of the ecosystem, overall usage experience and benefits, it is still one of the greatest. Facebook is also channeling efforts into making React even faster with a rewrite of the underlying reconciliation algorithm. The concepts that React introduced has taught us how to write better code, more maintainable web apps and made us better engineers. We like that.

The concept is a bit complex, but if you're interested in finding out how we might see React in a few years, you can read this documentation from the React page: https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture

Fiber is the new reconciliation engine in React 16. Its main goal is to enable incremental rendering of the virtual DOM. This is a complicated concept, basically, this new algorithm is a reimplementation of older versions of the React reconciler, has some improvements on prioritizing the order of how things are rendered, breaks the limits of the call stack, and lets it pause or start rendering work wherever required. You can read more here and here

The result was "Jikji" library (why Jikji? it will need another blog:)) ). It uses React Fiber to get the component hierarchy and reorganized, split, and layout the components before rendering and making a print-ready web view that can easily be printed or converted to PDF or images.

The mechanism to diff one tree with another to determine which parts need to be changed and then update the original DOM with it is called Reconciliation. You can learn about Reconciliation here. ReactJS uses a new reconciliation engine called Fiber since version 16.0. You can read more about the React Fiber Architecture here.

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.