alt Hacker NewsThat's fair, though IMHO some marketing from Vercel does make it difficult for someone not versed in the internals to understand what is "privileged in the React client" and what is not. That's their prerogative as a leading maintainer, of course.
And completely understand that freezing a format causes all kinds of difficulties, and semver alone doesn't solve for the resulting community frustration. So I understand why the decisions were made - it's just all a bit foreign to me compared to the groundbreaking simplicity of React's APIs in its earliest days, where if you understood a render cycle the entire world was your oyster. The internals of the renderer were always fine to be "off limits" - but wire formats just feel quite different to me.
(Also, just want to say you're an absolute hero of mine, and my hopefully-gentle nudging on this is because I love everything the React team has created, and I want React to see its full potential!)
It’s fair, the docs could be better! And there are certainly subtleties with hooking up the router and bundler and everything. However I will say that really there is no funny business going on.
Basically the entire elaborate RSC apparatus just ultimately outputs a tree of plain React elements with promises and <Suspense> to make it streamy. Sounds like groundbreaking simplicity to me! I kid a bit but really I’m not sure that the RSC wire format is any easier as an output target than the existing public React client API.
Maybe I should make a little demo to show that.
But anyway the point is that the wire format is an implementation detail because the two sides of the wire are actually the same program. Even if they’re running on two different computers.