I Tried React Compiler

The article discusses the recent experimentation with the React Compiler, an open-source tool developed by the React core team aimed at optimizing performance by reducing unnecessary re-renders in React applications. The author reflects on the common challenges developers face with memoization techniques, such as React.memo, useMemo, and useCallback, which can be complex to implement correctly. The React Compiler aims to simplify this by automatically memoizing components, props, and hooks' dependencies without requiring extensive code rewrites.

The author conducted tests on three different applications to evaluate the Compiler's effectiveness. The first app, a large legacy project, showed that only 2 out of 10 identified unnecessary re-renders were resolved by the Compiler. The second app, a smaller React and Next.js project, yielded the same disappointing result. The third app, a simple personal project, had only one of eight unnecessary re-renders fixed by the Compiler. Despite the initial promise of the tool, the results across all applications were underwhelming, indicating that the Compiler may not yet be a comprehensive solution for optimizing performance in real-world scenarios. The author concludes that while the React Compiler simplifies some aspects of memoization, its practical effectiveness in reducing re-renders remains limited.