In other dev news: Learn React in the most hilarious way, Nuxt update increases stability, and the HTMHell Advent Calendar seeks submissions.
At its core, the useEffectEvent hook allows you to create stable event handlers within effects. These handlers always have access to the latest state and props, even without being included in the effect's dependency array. However, on a broader scope, the Hook provides a solution to a subtle but common challenge that affects how effects in React handle the stale closure problem.
Efficient History Storage with JSON Patches: Instead of storing full state snapshots for each history entry, travels uses JSON Patch (RFC 6902) to store only the differences between states. This dramatically reduces memory usage, especially for large state objects with small changes. For example, changing a single field in a 1MB object only stores a few bytes in history. High-Performance Immutable Updates: Mutative is 10x faster than Immer and provides a mutation-based API for updating immutable data structures.
React Router was first released in November 2014 by Michael Jackson (not that M.J.) and Ryan Florence. At the time, most React developers were still figuring out how to handle navigation in single-page apps without resorting to low-level history manipulation. React Router provided a simple alternative. It lets you declare routes as JSX elements, which fit naturally into React's component model and way of thinking.
When I started researching, I found that there are solutions outside of Next.js, but they were either incomplete or tied to specific tools like Vite or esbuild. The more I dug, the more I realized that what we really have is a pattern without a proper implementation. It reminded me of Flux back in the day-a pattern that introduced new ideas but lacked clear direction on how those ideas should fit into existing applications.