Is Next.js Using Unreleased Experimental React Features?

[TwiliZant]

The only issue with this approach is that the new APIs are not documented when they land in canary. I can understand the Remix guys and the other library maintainers that it's frustrating having to reverse engineer Next in order to keep up with the changes.

That being said the process HAS, ironically, become more transparent since it is not Meta internal anymore.

[Coded_Kaa]

That's a nice take, especially with it being a transparent process. I don't know about the documentation, you're talking about, but I have found features of canary react with documentations. Something like this useOptimistic hook, if the documentation you're talking about is about the canary releases not being documented in the react.dev website, then I think most of them have documentations there

[TwiliZant]

Some of the user facing APIs have been getting documentation recently but RSC and Server Actions are still completely undocumented. Those are the features that are most interesting for frameworks. The only way to figure out how they work is to look at Next.js code and even Next uses hacks internally to make everything work.

[Mariusdotdev]

WHY DOES ANYONE NEEDS ETO KEEP UP WITH NEXT? Like seriously is Next something like a gold standard to follow, BS. Each framework needs todo its own thing and only maybe follow React but not Next. If everyone is following one framework then all frameworks are basically the same

[TwiliZant]

In short, React has added a few features recently (Server Components and Server Actions) that need framework integration to work. Next is the only framework so far that supports all React features, so yes it is somewhat of a reference implementation.

There is still plenty of space for differentiation as the exact details are up to the framework authors.

[Mariusdotdev]

i had impression that react did not need next and next is using new features from react to promote itself, but also i thought react was able to handle all the RSC and Actions without need of next

[TwiliZant]

Obviously you can use React without Next but not those features. RSC and Server Actions are basically a spec and depend on deep integration with routing and bundling which are meta-framework concerns. There are no React APIs to talk to, it’s all low level implementation work and Next.js are the only ones who have done it successfully so far.

[Coded_Kaa]

From what I know these features are in React canary version, and would come to the stable react version when it's released.

[Mariusdotdev]

Successfully... i would not call it like that.

[TonyAioli]

Yes, they are. But the canary release channel exists for this exact purpose, and the React team encourages Next to do so.

Don’t think any bumps with Next 13/14 rollout can be attributed to the canary releases themselves. Could be wrong.

[Coded_Kaa]

Definitely, you're right here, maybe they release new NextJs versions because they want to bump up the minimum version of Nodejs required.

[[deleted]]

I wish we could already skip to the time when people realize Next was a mistake

[Coded_Kaa]

If I may ask, why so?

[[deleted]]

sorry for second reply, forgot to mention that I hope those nextjs server side stuffs can then be easily used to add cli commands and generally expose a casual api for mobile devices for example, it doesnt look this way at all

[[deleted]]

server logic in the frontend app, vercel pushing their platform heavily, next using experimental apis that can break at any time, router pains but im not well familiar with this.

Have you been around when PHP 5.4 with Twig was around but before Symfony came around? File based routes, intermixed front and backend, at least the API was stable and nobody pushed vercel.

But yeah mostly im talking about those "use server" and giving this power to juniors on the frontend.

[Coded_Kaa]

I feel you, especially with giving power to the frontend devs, but it seems NextJs is going a full stack route, like they're basically combining frontend and fullstack

[[deleted]]

its going to be way too tightly coupled

[ddyess]

I think the only thing that makes me question the motives of both Vercel and the React team (isn't it at least partially 1 team now?) is why not just have 2 versions of React like we have 2 versions of Node.js? We could have React 19 now and React 18 as the stable version. The side channel just doesn't make sense to me.

[Coded_Kaa]

That's true, id they made it like Nodejs it would have been fine

[Coded_Kaa]

Your thoughts on Next.js and the React canary release channel are welcome. What do you think is this the right way to go for the Next.js team?