Vjeux

Learn about all the history of React and all the optimizations that happen behind the scene to make it fast by default.

React has managed to be successful at scale thanks to the fact that it makes finding the root cause of bugs easier through various mechanisms that I explain in this talk.

PHP and JavaScript are both renowned to be languages with a lot of quirks. However two major initiatives on both sides, Hack for PHP and ES6 for JavaScript made the languages much better and modern. In this article I'm going to show all the ES6 features that are also in Hack.

Arrow Function

Both languages adopted the same shorter way to write functions. On JavaScript side, the main advantage is the automatic binding of this and for PHP it removes the need to declare all the variables you want to use from outside. ES6, Hack.

// JavaScript
var odds = evens.map(v => v + 1);
var nums = evens.map((v, i) => v + i);
nums.filter(v => {
  if (v % 5 === 0) {
    console.log(v);
    return true;
  }
  return false;
});

// Hack
$odds = array_map($v ==> $v + 1, $evens);
$nums = array_map(($v, $i) ==> $v + $i, $evens);
array_filter($nums, $v ==> {
  if ($v % 5 === 0) {
    echo $v;
    return true;
  }
  return false;
});

Class

JavaScript finally gets a class abstraction with ES6. It is however the bare minimal one to be useful, you cannot define constants, protected/private methods, traits ... PHP on this side is much better, without any Hack addition. ES6, PHP5.

// JavaScript
class SkinnedMesh extends THREE.Mesh {
  constructor(geometry, materials) {
    super(geometry, materials);
    this.idMatrix = SkinnedMesh.defaultMatrix();
    this.bones = [];
  }
  update(camera) {
    super.update();
  }
  static defaultMatrix() {
    return new THREE.Matrix4();
  }
}

// Hack
class SkinnedMesh extends THREE\Mesh {
  public function constructor($geometry, $materials) {
    parent::__construct($geometry, $materials);
    $this->idMatrix = SkinnedMesh::defaultMatrix();
    $this->bones = array();
  }
  public function update($camera) {
    parent::update();
  }
  static private function defaultMatrix() {
    return new THREE\Matrix4();
  }
}

Enhanced Object Literal

One long standing issue with object literals in JavaScript is the inability to use an expression as a key. This is fixed with the bracket notation in ES6. PHP 5.4 introduced a short notation for arrays as well. ES6, PHP.

// JavaScript
var obj = { [Math.random()]: true };

// Hack
$obj = [rand() => true];

Template Strings

Multiline strings and variable interpolations are something that have always been possible in PHP, yet they only start to work in ES6! ES6, PHP.

// JavaScript
var multiline = `In JavaScript this is
 not legal.`
var name = 'Bob',
    time = 'today';
`Hello ${name}, how are you ${time}?`

// Hack
$multiline = 'In PHP this is
 legal.';
$name = 'Bob';
$time = 'today';
"Hello $name, how are you $time?";

Default Arguments

It was possible to write default arguments in JavaScript but ES6 adds proper support for it right in the function declaration. Guess what, PHP had support for it all along. ES6, PHP.

// JavaScript
function f(x, y=12) {
  return x + y;
}
f(3) === 15;
f(2, 10) === 12;

// Hack
function f($x, $y=12) {
  return $x + $y;
}
f(3) === 15;
f(2, 10) === 12;

Iterator + for of

JavaScript has two ways to iterate on collections, either

for (var i = 0; i < array.length; ++i) { var element = array[i]; /* ... */ }
for (var key in object) { var element = object[key]; /* ... */ }

ES6 is now introducing a unified way to do iteration, that PHP always had, as well as a way to write custom collections via the iterator pattern, introduced in PHP5. ES6, PHP, PHP5.

// JavaScript
var fibonacci = {
  [Symbol.iterator]: function() {
    var previous = 0;
    var current = 1;
    return {
      next: function() {
        var new_previous = current; 
        current += previous; 
        previous = new_previous; 
 
 
        return {
          value: current,
 
 
          done: false
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
 
 
 
 
 
for (var n of fibonacci) {
  if (n > 1000) break;
  console.log(n);
}

// Hack
class Fibonacci implements Iterator { 
  private $key = 0;    
  private $previous = 1;
  private $current = 0;
 
  public function next() { 
      $new_previous = $this->current; 
      $this->current += $this->previous; 
      $this->previous = $new_previous; 
      $this->key++; 
  } 
  public function current() { 
      return $this->current; 
  } 
  public function valid() { 
      return true; 
  } 
  public function key() { 
      return $this->key; 
  } 
  public function rewind() { 
      $this->previous = 1; 
      $this->current = 0; 
      $this->key = 0; 
  } 
}
foreach (new Fibonacci() as $n) { 
  if ($n > 1000) break; 
  echo $n; 
}

Generators

Python pioneered generators as another tool to manage control flow. It has originally been designed and promoted as an easier way to write iterators, but really shined as a better way to write asynchronous operations than callbacks. ES6, PHP5.

// JavaScript
var fibonacci = {
  [Symbol.iterator]: function*() {
    var previous = 1;
    var current = 0;
    for (;;) {
      var new_previous = current; 
      current += previous; 
      previous = new_previous; 
      yield current;
    }
  }
}
for (var n of fibonacci) {
  if (n > 1000) break;
  console.log(n);
}

// Hack
 
function fibonacci() {
  $previous = 1;
  $current = 0;
  for (;;) {
    $new_previous = $current; 
    $current += $previous; 
    $previous = $new_previous; 
    yield $current;
  }
}
 
foreach (fibonacci() as $n) { 
  if ($n > 1000) break; 
  echo $n; 
}

ES7 Async Await

C# introduced the concept of async/await combination to deal with asynchronous programming. The underlying implementation is very similar to generators but has proper syntax support. It is an addition of Hack on-top of PHP. ES7, Hack.

// JavaScript
async function chainAnimationsAsync(element, animations) {
  var result = null;
  try {
    for (var animation in animations) {
      result = await animation(element);
    }
  } catch (e) { /* ignore and keep going */ }
  return result;
}

// Hack
async function chainAnimationsAsync($element, $animations) {
  $result = null;
  try {
    foreach ($animations as $animation) {
      $result = await animation($element);
    }
  } catch (Exception $e) { /* ignore and keep going */ }
  return $result;
}

Map + Set

Both JavaScript and PHP are notorious for attempting to fit all the collection use cases into a single general purpose type. Both ES6 and Hack bring to the table proper support for Map and Set. ES6, Hack

// JavaScript
var s = new Set();
s.add('hello').add('goodbye').add('hello');
s.size === 2;
s.has('hello') === true;
 
var m = new Map();
m.set('hello', 42);
m.get('hello') === 42;

// Hack
$s = new Set();
$s->add('hello')->add('goodbye')->add('hello');
$s->count() === 2;
$s->contains('hello') === true;
 
$m = new Map();
$m->set('hello', 42);
$m->get('hello') === 42;

TypeScript

Last but not least, both languages are getting gradual typing. TypeScript, Hack.

// JavaScript
class Greeter {
  greeting: T;
  constructor(message: T) {
    this.greeting = message;
  }
  greet() {
    return this.greeting;
  }
}
 
var greeter = new Greeter("Hello, world");
console.log(greeter->greet());

// Hack
class Greeter {
 
  public function __construct(private T $greeting) {}
 
 
  public function greet() {
    return $this->greeting;
  }
}
 
$greeter = new Greeter("Hello, world");
echo $greeter->greet();

Conclusion

With ES6 and Hack efforts, JavaScript and PHP are becoming languages with modern features. If you tried them 5 years ago, you should take another look, they are not as crappy as they once were 🙂

A cyber security provider’s main task is to protect your business from all forms of cyber-attacks.  If and when an attack happens, https://www.sapphire.net/ will know exactly what to do.

Originally posted on Perf Planet.

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces developed by Facebook. It has been designed from the ground up with performance in mind. In this article I will present how the diff algorithm and rendering work in React so you can optimize your own apps.

Diff Algorithm

Before we go into the implementation details it is important to get an overview of how React works.

var MyComponent = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    if (this.props.first) {
      return <div className="first"><span>A Span</span></div>;
    } else {
      return <div className="second"><p>A Paragraph</p></div>;
    }
  }
});

At any point in time, you describe how you want your UI to look like. It is important to understand that the result of render is not an actual DOM node. Those are just lightweight JavaScript objects. We call them the virtual DOM.

React is going to use this representation to try to find the minimum number of steps to go from the previous render to the next. For example, if we mount <MyComponent first={true} />, replace it with <MyComponent first={false} />, then unmount it, here are the DOM instructions that result:

None to first

• Create node: <div className="first"><span>A Span</span></div>

First to second

• Replace attribute: className="first" by className="second"
• Replace node: <span>A Span</span> by <p>A Paragraph</p>

Second to none

• Remove node: <div className="second"><p>A Paragraph</p></div>

Level by Level

Finding the minimal number of modifications between two arbitrary trees is a O(n⁴) problem. As you can imagine, this isn't tractable for our use case. React uses simple and yet powerful heuristics to find a very good approximation in O(n).

React only tries to reconcile trees level by level. This drastically reduces the complexity and isn't a big loss as it is very rare in web applications to have a component being moved to a different level in the tree. They usually only move laterally among children.

List

Let say that we have a component that on one iteration renders 5 components and the next inserts a new component in the middle of the list. This would be really hard with just this information to know how to do the mapping between the two lists of components.

By default, React associates the first component of the previous list with the first component of the next list, etc. You can provide a key attribute in order to help React figure out the mapping. In practice, this is usually easy to find out a unique key among the children.

Components

A React app is usually composed of many user defined components that eventually turns into a tree composed mainly of divs. This additional information is being taken into account by the diff algorithm as React will match only components with the same class.

For example if a <Header> is replaced by an <ExampleBlock>, React will remove the header and create an example block. We don't need to spend precious time trying to match two components that are unlikely to have any resemblance.

Event Delegation

Attaching event listeners to DOM nodes is painfully slow and memory-consuming. Instead, React implements a popular technique called "event delegation". React goes even further and re-implements a W3C compliant event system. This means that Internet Explorer 8 event-handling bugs are a thing of the past and all the event names are consistent across browsers.

Let me explain how it's implemented. A single event listener is attached to the root of the document. When an event is fired, the browser gives us the target DOM node. In order to propagate the event through the DOM hierarchy, React doesn't iterate on the virtual DOM hierarchy.

Instead we use the fact that every React component has a unique id that encodes the hierarchy. We can use simple string manipulation to get the id of all the parents. By storing the events in a hash map, we found that it performed better than attaching them to the virtual DOM. Here is an example of what happens when an event is dispatched through the virtual DOM.

// dispatchEvent('click', 'a.b.c', event)
clickCaptureListeners['a'](event);
clickCaptureListeners['a.b'](event);
clickCaptureListeners['a.b.c'](event);
clickBubbleListeners['a.b.c'](event);
clickBubbleListeners['a.b'](event);
clickBubbleListeners['a'](event);

The browser creates a new event object for each event and each listener. This has the nice property that you can keep a reference of the event object or even modify it. However, this means doing a high number of memory allocations. React at startup allocates a pool of those objects. Whenever an event object is needed, it is reused from that pool. This dramatically reduces garbage collection.

Rendering

Batching

Whenever you call setState on a component, React will mark it as dirty. At the end of the event loop, React looks at all the dirty components and re-renders them.

This batching means that during an event loop, there is exactly one time when the DOM is being updated. This property is key to building a performant app and yet is extremely difficult to obtain using commonly written JavaScript. In a React application, you get it by default.

Sub-tree Rendering

When setState is called, the component rebuilds the virtual DOM for its children. If you call setState on the root element, then the entire React app is re-rendered. All the components, even if they didn't change, will have their render method called. This may sound scary and inefficient but in practice, this works fine because we're not touching the actual DOM.

First of all, we are talking about displaying the user interface. Because screen space is limited, you're usually displaying on the orders of hundreds to thousands of elements at a time. JavaScript has gotten fast enough business logic for the whole interface is manageable.

Another important point is that when writing React code, you usually don't call setState on the root node every time something changes. You call it on the component that received the change event or couple of components above. You very rarely go all the way to the top. This means that changes are localized to where the user interacts.

Selective Sub-tree Rendering

Finally, you have the possibility to prevent some sub-trees to re-render. If you implement the following method on a component:

boolean shouldComponentUpdate(object nextProps, object nextState)

based on the previous and next props/state of the component, you can tell React that this component did not change and it is not necessary to re-render it. When properly implemented, this can give you huge performance improvements.

In order to be able to use it, you have to have to be able to compare JavaScript objects. There are many issues that raises such as should the comparison be shallow or deep; if it's deep should we use immutable data structures or do deep copies.

And you want to keep in mind that this function is going to be called all the time, so you want to make sure that it takes less time to compute that heuristic than the time it would have taken to render the component, even if re-rendering was not strictly needed.

Conclusion

The techniques that make React fast are not new. We've known for a long time that touching the DOM is expensive, you should batch write and read operations, event delegation is faster ...

People still talk about them because in practice, they are very hard to implement in regular JavaScript code. What makes React stand out is that all those optimizations happen by default. This makes it hard to shoot yourself in the foot and make your app slow.

The performance cost model of React is also very simple to understand: every setState re-renders the whole sub-tree. If you want to squeeze out performance, call setState as low as possible and use shouldComponentUpdate to prevent re-rendering an large sub-tree.

E4X (ECMAScript for XML) is a Javascript syntax extension and a runtime to manipulate XML. It was promoted by Mozilla but failed to become mainstream and is now deprecated. JSX was inspired by E4X. In this article, I'm going to go over all the features of E4X and explain the design decisions behind JSX.

Historical Context

E4X has been created in 2002 by John Schneider. This was the golden age of XML where it was being used for everything: data, configuration files, code, interfaces (DOM) ... E4X was first implemented inside of Rhino, a Javascript implementation from Mozilla written in Java.

At the time, a very common operation was to transform XML documents into other XML documents, especially in the Java world. The two major ways to do that were either XSLT or the DOM API. Both those technologies suffer from very bad reputation as they are very tedious to work with.

Since then, the Javascript landscape evolved and the assumptions E4X was developed under do not hold true anymore. JSON has now largely replaced XML to represent data and JSON can be manipulated natively within Javascript. Libraries like jQuery made DOM searching, filtering and basic manipulation a lot easier thank to CSS selectors.

Creating a DOM structure is the only major problem that is still not properly solved. Current solutions involve creating a different "templating" language language (Mustache, Jade), creating a poor man's DSL (MagicDOM) or to use HTML modified with special attributes (Angular). This is the problem JSX is trying to solve.

The Good Parts

XML syntax is particularly good at expressing interfaces. Many people (including myself) have tried to create pure Javascript libraries that have a syntax similar to XML but none of them look really good.

With E4X, you can write XML within Javascript like this:

var header =
  <div>
    <h1><a href="/">Vjeux</a></h1>
    <h2>French Web Developer</h2>
  </div>;

The real power of E4X comes from the interpolation mechanism. You can write Javascript expressions within {}. This lets you write dynamic HTML.

var links = [
  {name: 'Talks & Written Reports', url: '/reports'},
  {name: 'Contact', url: '/contact/'}
];
var body =
  <body>
    {header}
    <div class="left_nav">
      <input type="text" name="search" />
      <h2>About Me</h2>
      <ul>{section.elements.map(function(element) {
        var isActive = element.url == window.location;
        return <li class={isActive ? 'active' : ''}>
          {isActive ?
            element.name :
            <a href={element.url}>{element.name}</a>
          }
        </li>;
      })}</ul>
    </div>
  </body>

This example shows that this simple construct coupled with Javascript can solve what templates have been designed to.

• partials: header has been defined somewhere else and the resulting DOM node is just being included. In this case header was just a variable but I could as easily have used a function call to create it.
• lists: The result of the interpolation can be a Javascript array. In order to create it, you can use the default map, filter, or any Javascript library that manipulate arrays (like Underscore for example).
• conditions: Again, I don't need a special syntax here, Javascript already has the ternary operator. For more complex conditions you can call a function that will contain if/then/else statements.
• nesting: Within an interpolated block, you can write XML in which you can use another interpolated block, and so on ... With templates you can only do that one level, if you have a problem that requires you to have more, then you have to go back to string concatenation.

The XML notation and the extremely powerful interpolation mechanism have been re-used as is in JSX. Now let's see the other parts of E4X that didn't work so well and what JSX does to address them.

XML Objects

While the XML object looks and behaves in a similar way to a regular JavaScript object, the two are not the same thing. E4X introduces new syntax that only works with E4X XML objects. The syntax is designed to be familiar to JavaScript programmers, but E4X does not provide a direct mapping from XML to native JavaScript objects; just the illusion of one.

Downsides

The major use case of XML within Javascript is to write HTML tags. Unfortunately, what E4X generates is not a DOM node. In order to use it to generate DOM nodes, you've got to do a conversion phase not provided by default.

The second use case of XML is to represent data. In Javascript world, this use case is already being fulfilled by JSON. E4X only supports strings as a data type where Javascript objects can contain numbers, booleans, functions ...

All the code is not going to be converted to E4X right away. There's going to be a transition phase where E4X and non E4X code will have to co-exist. The fact that the objects E4X generates are not accessible from non E4X code means that none of the libraries ever written can work with E4X structures.

JSX

JSX, contrary to E4X, does not contain a runtime for XML, it is only a syntactic sugar. It translates XML syntax into function calls:

<Node attr1="first" attr2="second">
  <Child />
</Node>

is converted into the following standard Javascript:

Node({attr1: 'first', attr2: 'second'},
  Child({})
)

The syntax is no longer tied to a specific implementation of the node representation. JSX is pure syntactic sugar. There are cases where you cannot use JSX, for example if you are writing your application in CoffeeScript, but it doesn't prevent you from using the underlying implementation of the XML nodes.

Because it is only a syntactic sugar, there is no need to provide a way to express all the edge cases. Computed attributes, for example, are tricky because they introduce a lot of implementation specific questions when the same attribute is specified more than once. Instead of dealing with them, it has been decided not to support it in JSX and let the users do it in regular Javascript.

var attributes = {a: 1, b: 2, c: 3};
<Node *{attributes} /> // Not valid JSX
Node(attributes) // Regular Javascript equivalent

Namespaces

Each node is identified by a name. In order to prevent conflict in the meaning of the nodes, each node also contains a namespace, encoded as an URI.

default xml namespace = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";
<div />.name();
// { localName: 'div', uri: 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' }
 
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" />.name();
// { localName: 'svg', uri: 'http://www.w3.org/1999/svg' }
 
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><circle /></svg>..circle.name();
// { localName: 'circle', uri: 'http://www.w3.org/1999/svg' }

Every single element in E4X contains a namespace. Most of them use the default namespace that you can override using a special JS syntax default xml namespace =. You can also set a namespace on a node using the xmlns attribute and it's going to be propagated to all the sub-tree.

The namespaces solve the problem of name conflict. E4X implements it making an identifier (URI namespace, String name) unique. This is indeed working but have downsides.

Downsides

This is very weird to have to specify a URL because this URL is just a unique identifier, it is not going to get fetched or influence the way the program run.

Maintaining a unique URL and making sure it is going to stay valid is not a trivial task. There are also many questions that are raised such as what happens if your project is private. How do you deal with versioning.

URLs are usually very long and they are a distraction when you look at the code. Everyone just copy and pasted the doctype value pre-HTML5.

In the end, the XML namespaces didn't get really popular in the front-end community.

JSX

JSX uses Javascript to deal with the namespace problem. In E4X, each node type is not represented by a unique string across your program. In JSX a node type is represented by a Javascript variable. You can use all the Javascript features (eg variable hoisting, capturing via closure, function arguments ...) in order to find the proper node type you want to use.

var div = ReactDOM.div;
<div />
 
var div = JSXDOM.div;
<div />
 
var div = SomeJSFunctionThatReturnsADiv();
<div />

JSX is also totally optional. The actual representation of a node type is behind the scenes just a Javascript function. If you are not using JSX, you can create the node by calling it the following way:

// Using JSX:
<div attr="str"><br /></div>
 
// Without JSX:
ReactDOM.div({attr: 'str}, ReactDOM.br());

Because native DOM elements are used so often, JSX also have a way to declare a default namespace. You can add a special comment at the top of the file @jsx ReactDOM and JSX will assume that all the native elements are attributes of the object you mentioned. This is not the cleanest API but it works.

/** @jsx React.DOM */
<div /> // ReactDOM.div

Query Language

E4X is not only about creating XML fragments, it also extends Javascript syntax in order to find elements in an XML document. The integration is well done and expressive, it is worth looking at it.

var people = (
  <people>
    <person><name>Bob</name><age>32</age></person>
    <person><name>Joe</name><age>46</age></person>
  </people>
);
 
people.person.(name == "Joe").age // 46
 
// Filter expressions can even use JavaScript functions:
function over40(i) {
  return i > 40;
}
people.person.(over40(parseInt(age))).name // Joe
 
elem.@attr // attribute

Downsides

In my opinion, this is one of the main reason that prevented E4X from being more widely adopted.
In order to get a new language extension to be adopted by all the browsers, the bar is extremely high and this feature doesn't seem to cut it.

• It isn't really an issue in the community. jQuery became pretty successful thanks to its way to query the DOM. The overall feeling is that the current solution is satisfying and here hasn't been a strong push for help at the syntax level.
• The query language extends the surface area. Creating XML and querying XML are two orthogonal concepts that do not need to be addressed together. Bundling them together highly reduces the chance of them being accepted.
• A query language is highly controversial. There isn't a consensus on what's the best way to query a XML document and will probably never be. It is even harder to sell as it isn't even using an already existing standard such as XPath or CSS selectors but comes up with a completely new one.

JSX

It is not part of JSX.

Interpolation

Since E4X is not manipulating a plain string, it is able to differentiate between the parts that are nodes and the parts that are attributes and children. This has the extremely strong property from a security point of view that it can prevent code injections by automatically escaping attributes.

var userInput = '"<script>alert("Pwn3d!");</script>';
<div class={userInput} />.toXMLString()
// <div class="&quot;&lt;script&gt;alert(&quot;Pwn3d!&quot;)&lt;/script&gt;"></div>

Downsides

XML can only manipulate strings and nodes. This means that all the attributes are first converted to strings.

JSX

Since we are now living in a Javascript world, we don't need to restrict ourself to strings. For example, it is possible to use a Javascript object to represent the style property:

<div style={{borderRadius: 10, borderColor: 'red'}} />
// <div style="-webkit-border-radius: 10px; border-color: red;" />

Callbacks don't need to be passed as string that is going to be evaluated, it is possible to use normal Javascript functions.

<div onClick={function() { console.log('Clicked!'); }} />

More is Less

When studying E4X, I stumbled across many small things that I either found weird or not really needed. This section is a compilation of them.

Attributes values are not Strings

The attributes values are not Javascript strings, they are special objects with the toString method implemented.

<div class="something">.@class === 'something'
// false
<div class="something">.@class.toString() === 'something'
// true

Prototype syntax

They introduced a special syntax function:: to add new methods on XML objects:

XML.prototype.function::fooCount = function fooCount() {
  return this..foo.length();
};
 
<foobar><foo/><foo/><foo/></foobar>.fooCount() // returns 3

Processing Instructions

E4X supports an obscure variant of XML tags: processing instructions of the form . There is a special flag to enable them in the output, but they are always properly parsed.

<foo><?process x="true"?></foo>.toXMLString()
// <foo />;
 
XML.ignoreProcessingInstructions = false;
<foo><?process x="true"?></foo>.toXMLString()
// <foo><?process x="true"?></foo>;

Operator overload +=

The += operator can be used to append new elements to an XMLList.

var xmlList = <></>;
xmlList += <node />;

Operator overload for attributes

You can get and set attributes using @attr.

var element = <foo bar="1" />;
console.log(element.@bar); // "1"
element.@bar = 2;

Conclusion

E4X had a lot of potential but unfortunately did not take off. JSX attempts to keep only the good parts of E4X. Since it is much smaller in features and only a Javascript transform, it is more likely to be adopted.