alt Hacker NewsI haven't tried the compiler yet, but I been very skeptical of the automatic memoization features. Both in that sometimes the default strategy to decide when to memoize is not good enough but also the hidden flow to trigger the memoization causing hard to spot performance regressions.
I would be interest to hear how it worked out for you.
It really does work very well in practice. A few things really help:
- Lints [1] that flag code that cannot be (correctly) optimised. Usually this is obscure code that is too smart for its own good. But the compiler leaves it alone and flags it for review, so most things just keep working.
- Lints that flag code that violate the rules of hooks. These rules became more critical to follow: failure to do so may break rendering. But non-compliant code can be easily be excluded from compilation [2], so you do not have to fix everything at once.
- Popular libraries that are not compatible (yet) are flagged and excluded automatically [3].
The compiler is better than manual memoization, because 1) it is hard not to forget memoizations, and 2) the compiler's output memoizes more granularly than manual memoization realistically could.
I have not found performance regressions. Not saying they're not possible; but we haven't encountered them.
We have a very performance-sensitive project that used preact (chosen for performance) via its compatibility layer, that we switched to React + React compiler. Performance is noticeably better than with preact. Whereas previously the React-only version was incredibly slow even with carefully placed memoizations, because they were very hard to get right.
[1]: https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/installation#eslint-i...
[2]: https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/incremental-adoption
[3]: https://react.dev/reference/eslint-plugin-react-hooks/lints/...