6 posts tagged “dan-abramov”
2025
Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented user experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a full view of the network like they do.
The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and so on). Because it enables global aggregation, every atproto app has a consistent state of the world. There's no notion of "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation artifacts as you have in Mastodon.
I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or performance characteristics.
— Dan Abramov, Hacker News comment discussing his Open Social article
Progressive JSON. This post by Dan Abramov is a trap! It proposes a fascinating way of streaming JSON objects to a client in a way that provides the shape of the JSON before the stream has completed, then fills in the gaps as more data arrives... and then turns out to be a sneaky tutorial in how React Server Components work.
Ignoring the sneakiness, the imaginary streaming JSON format it describes is a fascinating thought exercise:
{
header: "$1",
post: "$2",
footer: "$3"
}
/* $1 */
"Welcome to my blog"
/* $3 */
"Hope you like it"
/* $2 */
{
content: "$4",
comments: "$5"
}
/* $4 */
"This is my article"
/* $5 */
["$6", "$7", "$8"]
/* $6 */
"This is the first comment"
/* $7 */
"This is the second comment"
/* $8 */
"This is the third comment"
After each block the full JSON document so far can be constructed, and Dan suggests interleaving Promise() objects along the way for placeholders that have not yet been fully resolved - so after receipt of block $3 above (note that the blocks can be served out of order) the document would look like this:
{
header: "Welcome to my blog",
post: new Promise(/* ... not yet resolved ... */),
footer: "Hope you like it"
}
I'm tucking this idea away in case I ever get a chance to try it out in the future.
2018
How Does React Tell a Class from a Function? (via) Understanding the answer requires a deep understanding of the history of the JavaScript class system plus how Babel and other tools work with it.
Dan Abramov:
For an API to be simple to use, you often need to consider the language semantics (possibly, for several languages, including future directions), runtime performance, ergonomics with and without compile-time steps, the state of the ecosystem and packaging solutions, early warnings, and many other things. The end result might not always be the most elegant, but it must be practical.
React is “value UI”. Its core principle is that UI is a value, just like a string or an array. You can keep it in a variable, pass it around, use JavaScript control flow with it, and so on. That expressiveness is the point — not some diffing to avoid applying changes to the DOM.
If you stop thinking in terms of MVC you might notice that at its core, React is a runtime for effectful functions that don’t execute “once”, but run continuously while being anchored to a call tree.
Making Sense of React Hooks (via) Dan Abramov provides the most comprehensive justification I’ve seen so far for the new React hooks API.