Facebook announces React Fiber, a rewrite of its React framework

Facebook has completely rewritten React, its popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. The company hasn’t previously talked much about React Fiber, as the project is called, but it has actually been working on it for a while. It’s now ready to talk about this project publicly in more detail (after word about it started spreading last year) and the plan is to put this rewrite into the hands of developers once React 16.0 launches later this year. It’s already in use on Facebook.com today, which clearly indicates that Facebook itself thinks it’s ready for prime time.

In addition, it is also launching a rewrite of Relay, its framework for building data-heavy applications.

React Fiber

The idea behind React Fiber, the company tells me, is to take what the company has learned from developing React the first time around and put that into an updated framework that is still fully backwards compatible with existing React-based applications. React Fiber, Facebook tells me, will become the foundation of any future improvements and feature development of the React framework.

The main focus here was to make React as responsive as possible, Facebook engineer — and member of the React core team — Ben Alpert told me in an interview earlier this week. “When we develop React, we’re always looking to see how we can help developers build high-quality apps quicker,” he noted. “We want to make it easier to make apps that perform very well and make them responsive.”

In light of this theme, it’s no surprise that the highlights of this new release are built-in primitives for scheduling and incremental rendering. “We want to make sure we render the right stuff at the right time,” Alpert said, and added that “responsiveness was a huge push here.”

But why rewrite React from scratch? “It was not necessarily that the old code base was bad, but we wanted to start with a new foundation that could power everything we do going forward,” Alpert said. That means the new code was developed from the ground up to be extensible, for example.

Alpert stressed that React Fiber will be backward compatible, though as with all major React updates, there will be a few small breaking changes. The team says it doesn’t anticipate that these will be problematic for developers, though. “We always had a strong API contract, so that gives us the flexibility to reimplement,” he added.

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