Fine grained reactivity and async first frameworks | Rich Harris | PodRocket

Hello and welcome to Pod Rocket, a web development podcast brought to you by Log Rocket. I'm Null and today I'm joined once again by Rich Harris. Uh he's currently a software engineer at Verscell. You probably know him as the creator of Spelt. Uh we're here to talk about a talk he recently gave at the Performance Now conference um titled Fine Grain Everything. How's it going, Rich? It's going great. How are you? >> Uh I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to jump in. It's always it's always a pleasure. you're uh a very knowledgeable guest to have on. So I always I always

appreciate these ones where we can we can get in a little bit deeper here. I was struggling a little bit with how to frame this one because in in the talk you kind of set up like you know uh a little React demo. Um you kind of talk about some of the shortcomings with uh React server components and why why it's kind of tricky to know what's going on there. Um and I think you kind of uh bring up a couple distinct problems. um one in is like the developer experience in using React server components and then like this the kind of performance

overhead of the RSC payloads and all this stuff you've got to worry about. I want to start there a little bit. Do you think those are the things that people are really like thinking about now when they're talking about front end frontend performance like that overhead of the exchange between the server and client and what that's going to cost in a given framework like is that what most people are thinking about when they're talking about this stuff? Some people certainly are. Honestly, I I think most people aren't really thinking in these terms at all when they're choosing a framework. They're just choosing the thing that is

going to enable them to be productive. And I I think it's more on us as the creators of these tools to be thinking deeply about about the impact of that. >> Yeah. Um, you know, are we designing primitives that are going to naturally result in robust and performant websites or are we going to create um primitives that, you know, inadvertently create extra work for our servers and and result in more data being transferred over, you know, our our fragile mobile

networks, >> right? >> And, you know, that that's that's really where um where that talk began. I think that there's going to be complexity overhead from the history where it was just ah single page app. We're going to make API calls, the data is going to come down, we're going to kind of update everything as necessary. Um, and like you know, at least feels to me like the dialogue is kind of one around like how does one mitigate that complexity the most effectively? Do you think we'll eventually get to a a a point where it

just it feels so kind of innate and the muscle memory is so there that it's not really a thing we have to think about kind of where we where we'd hit on in this maturity of you know like the single page apps of old or do you think there will always be a little bit of kind of um mental complexity? I mean it it it's certainly my hope that as as we go about this process of better understanding what problems we're facing and thinking deeply about what sort of

tools are best designed to address those problems that eventually you sort of you kind of just land on the things that feel the natural. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and like when you have the right tools in your tool belt, the complexity starts to kind of melt away. Like a lot of complexity that [clears throat] you see in code bases is really an artifact of >> people kind of fighting with their tools. Like there's a little bit of a mismatch between what they're trying to do and what the tool wants them to do.

Um and so yeah, I I you know, I think as a as a community we've learned a tremendous amount over the last decade. And I know it's sort of fashionable to decry some of the innovation that's happened over the last decade because you know the innovation is itself seen as a form of complexity. Um but really when you look at what we're able to build with the tools that we have today versus what we were able to build 10 years ago, it it truly is night and day. So I'm I'm just naturally inclined