What’s Next for Next.js with Tim Neutkens

welcome to syntax today we have Tim nokins on from versel next Jazz co-author of next Jazz to talk to us all about everything that's going on with react with nextjs 15 with server components with react compiler with turbo pack kind of a lot going on in the whole this whole Space recently so I thought like let's bring them on to to talk about it so welcome Tim thanks so much for coming on yeah thanks for having me where should we start this off um yeah well I mean we could start off

with some of the the hottest new stuff which would I guess be the compiler so you know I guess first and foremost I know I know you know this is a react thing and not a nextjs thing but I I'm sure you all are very tightly integrated into this what does the react compiler do for those people who might not be aware of what it is and what it does yeah so um if you watch the recent react con keynote um if you haven't

watch it i' highly recommend you to to watch it because it's definitely a much better explanation than than I will ever be able to do I think yeah but in essence it's like um in like 2018 react hooks were introduced um that there were a whole lot of hooks right so like uh you state use memo uh that kind of thing but really like in the end like they didn't have the ergonomics that you want uh event like when you're writing this code so they were like created in a way that you can like incrementally get rid of of them if you were to build a compiler uh at some point that's really what the react team did so they they

went ahead on like a pretty long journey I'm not sure exactly like how long they've been working on it exactly many years yeah something like four years which uh which also causes like people to to doubt like will ever like come right like uh are we ever going to have suspense like that kind of thing right um but now in the like last like two three weeks ago um they they announced that the react compiler is now both open

source so you can like view the the source code and it's in uh in beta so you can like try it out they didn't recommend you to ship it to production yet but they are shipping into production themselves in in like Instagram and uh and Bun of other places at meta to like really like dog food the uh the system um that that gives you like exposure to a lot of like different types of code right so like it's similar to like uh anytime you start building like compiler that transforms the original

source code into something else there there will be edge cases and and they're trying to catch all this edge cases so uh that's why it's like released early so people can try it out okay like what it what is it initial question it it basically does memorization for you automatically and not just for like the basic case is like I have a value that is like derived based on some state or some um B the things that you would usually like call ause Mo for that kind of thing those are the things that I can

having some re acknowledge like I can manually at them and like make rendering better right like don't re render this thing but it goes much further than that so like it it goes into like I was talking to someone on the on the forell team that works on the like forell website recently I was like showing him the react compiler like side to side to to what like if you don't have it enabled it was like I thought this is always like react worked already so why are you showing me this new thing um so

like another way that I look at it is like it makes the assumptions that you had around like how react renders a bit more like the the reality with the compiler because you don't have to think about um where do I add memo where do I like use call back where do I make sure that things don't reender and instead can just write my like prodct logic and and uh compiler can figure out