How Did React Come into Existence?
Learn about the origins of React and how it is maintained.
We'll cover the following
Origins of React
React was created at Facebook and open-sourced under a
Core engineers
The core engineers on the React Team do a great job to get the community involved with React’s newest developments early on. A call for React
While maintaining and developing React, the core engineers ensure that breaking
changes follow a clear deprecation schema.
Note: Breaking changes in this instance refers to changes in the codebase that are not backward compatible.
Any methods, properties, or functions that are scheduled to be deprecated will be flagged with a visible and easily noticed deprecation warning. Furthermore, the React Team provides a tool to safely amend old code with the new changes, called React-Codemod, which follows strict Semver conventions.
Releases
-
Only major releases will involve breaking changes, such as
16.x.x
to17.x.x
. -
A minor release will only contain new features or deprecation warnings (for example,
16.6.x
to16.7.x
). It can safely prepare and inform developers to upgrade their existing code. -
Bug fixes will be dealt with in a patch release, denoted by only bumping the version from
16.8.0
to16.8.1
.
Note: For the curious among us, there is the possibility to inspect soon-to-be-released features for major and minor releases by checking out Alpha, Beta, and RC versions. However, these features are subject to change, and we should therefore be careful when implementing them.
While this is useful for React’s user base, one can assume that it is in Facebook’s own interest to not cause problems by unplanned changes given that they have a large number of React components in their own codebase. However, transparency is always a given and you can follow along on GitHub’s issue tracker where all important changes are neatly summarized in Umbrella-Tickets.