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tried writing this blog 3 times but it’s really boring, so here’s the short version: React won. Every mainstream f/w now implements its ideas, and developed their own ecosystems. The ones that didn’t, lost and died. This implies there’s no _strong_ reason to not pick one of the other winners.

React should have adopted signals before going nuts on a compiler or RSCs IMO. My 5 year prediction is a solid one… 😜

Without a compiler, and with the virtualized DOM paradigm, I don’t really know that react is in a great position to benefit from signals. Frameworks that use compilers and “templated“ DOM (including JSX usage) will always have an advantage using any reactive primitive for targeted updates

For React to fully benefit from Signals, it would need to get rid of vdom. That would be a huge (but really good) breaking change,

Put differently, if we react has to build an object tree, and then diff it against another object tree in order to know what to update, then targeted updates aren’t really on the table. And reactive types like signals really don’t have any direct advantage for react.

I still genuinely don't know what "React adopt signals" would _mean_ at a technical level. Per other comments in this thread, React works at the component level. What would a hypothetical native-to-React signals integration do differently?

It would have to have been something new. Breaking likely. Signals would allow: - finer grained updates than “component” e.g. jsx fragments - state/data flow that isn’t tied to component hierarchy and doesn’t need to rerender (or subscribe to a store to rerender) itself and its children

Still feel you can get very close with React + Jotai. Jotai has nearly the same API as Signals. It’s also underrated vs Zustand IMO. Atomic state is so beautiful and elegant once you master it.

Indeed. They would have discovered that signals optimize data flow across paths a compiler can never know about, including across files/dependencies/bundles. They make the entire compiler redundant.