React Conf Highlights, Vercel Raises Another $250m, and Astro Adds Actions

Front-End Fire

We’ve got an exciting episode with our co-host Jack Herrington fresh from his trip to React Conf where the React core team and close collaborators unveiled all the cool things they’ve been working on, including the much anticipated React Compiler and some exciting new features for React Native Expo.

React Compiler is a new Babel-enabled plugin that will allow React apps to handle the memoization and re-rendering of components in an application so that developers won’t have to use the useMemo() and useCallback() hooks themselves. It will essentially save devs from having to think about it (and save them from the foot guns of implementing it incorrectly), and it is completely optional (not built in to React 19) and can be done via incremental adoption across an already existing application.

In related news, Vercel (the creators of Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world) announced they had raised $250m in funding, and the company is currently valued at $3.25b. Just wow! While we can only assume some of that funding will go towards continuing to improve Next.js and their core business of web hosting, they also said they’ll continue to invest heavily in their v0 generative UI system, which currently generates copy-and-paste friendly React code using shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS that people can use in their projects.

Another popular JavaScript framework, Astro, made a splash as well with its release of Astro 4.8. In addition to the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, it added experimental support for Astro Actions with niceties like full type-safety, a single global action file that any client component can access, automatically parsing form request objects using a Zod schema, and progressive enhancement on forms.

Finally, the news wraps up with some new features that came out in the Safari 17.5 release.

News:

• Paige - Astro Actions in v4.8
• Jack - React Compiler, React Compiler Playground, Jack’s in-depth video of React Compiler
• TJ - Vercel raises $250m; valued at $3.25b

Bonus News:

• TJ - Safari 17.5

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Parks and Recreation TV series
• Jack - How to ADHD book
• TJ - NYT games

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

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