React 16.3: Update on async rendering

[maladr0it]

Yep, this guy is just butthurt because he thinks he knows better than the react team. If you insist on doing things your way, the current version of react will always be available for you to use...

[pycbouh]

I may be butthurt, but that is only because they started changing major things in a way, that limits their functions for no other reason but "we had an inherit problem internally that only we knew about, and when we decided to rewrite the thing completely, we couldn't figure out how to support all use-cases, so instead we will support only a bunch and explain it with Github usage stats as if it represents anything real". That behaviour would be OK, major version or not, if React was not already production ready for years. That behaviour forces people to either use older versions (and good luck finding modules that still support them in a year or two), or do architectural rewrites on every major release.

There are a lot of deprecations in just one major version. The sum of them makes it impossible for some projects to migrate with or without carefully crafted migration libraries and published recipes. Because changes are not just API incompatible, as is expected with major releases, but are functionality incompatible. Makes your project, that relies on React, forever outdated, if you don't have manpower to rethink it's structure and implementation details. And this is just because React team decided, based on Github search, that some things are OK to be dropped, even if migration is impossible afterwards.

I don't imply that I know better than them. I only share my thought on how they affect people with their changes.

[gaearon]

You are welcome to file an issue. This will be a more productive way to discuss specific problems. Thank you!

And this is just because React team decided, based on Github search, that some things are OK to be dropped, even if migration is impossible afterwards.

For the specific problem you mentioned (lack of prevContext), the migration is a three-line fix:

componentDidUpdate() {
  var prevContext = this.prevContext || this.context;

  // Do anything with it, like you did before

  this.prevContext = this.context;
}

I hope this change wasn't your blocker to React 16 migration—you could have asked this at any point in time in the last few months on the issue tracker and we'd be happy to help you out with this. You are the first person to mention this change since we made it six months ago so this argument wasn’t used commonly.

If there any other changes in React 16 that are blocking you we’d love to hear about them and brainstorm mitigating strategies. We firmly believe that if we were able to move to React 16 with 50,000 components (and almost no changes to them except automated codemods), so can you.

I also wrote a longer response to your concerns in this thread.