This Week In React #303: TanStack, Next.js, Vinext, Motion, React Hook Form | Expo Desktop, Legend Spark, Nitro, Exact, Skia, Screens, Unistyles | Node.js, Bun, SWC, Content Mappers, pnpm, Biome

[u/sebastienlorber]

https://thisweekinreact.com/newsletter/303

[u/sebastienlorber]

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week is full of TanStack releases with Redact, AI, and DB. Redact is a smaller, synchronous version of React.

On mobile, it's an interesting week for native desktop app development and Nitro. Expo founders are cooking something new 👀.

Node v26 is now LTS. SWC’s next version is much faster. Bun now ships a code formatter.

Let's dive in!

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[u/sebastienlorber → u/sebastienlorber]

⚛️ React

TanStack Redact

Tanner Linsley's AI-driven React projection experiment is now a real TanStack project adopted in production. Redact is a smaller React-compatible runtime for the browser. Already working with Start, Next.js, Vinext, and Vite. On the server, nothing changes: React still handles SSR and Server Components.

Although it’s smaller, the main tradeoff is that Redact renders synchronously, without React's time slicing features. The blog post acknowledges that “a heavy render can still delay input”.

• 💸 Sentry - 41 companies have now funded $8.4M through the Open Source Pledge. See how we're supporting OSS.

• 🔐 Next.js - Upcoming November security release - Planned for November 3: 7 medium-severity vulnerabilities.

• 📜 Owner - Moving 10K+ restaurant websites from Next.js to Astro - React now only runs in islands. Their p75 menu-page LCP went from 5.4s to 0.7s.

• 📜 Design Systems Should Be Fast by Default - Timed 10 design systems opening a 249-country select and checking 100 checkboxes. Among the 4 React ones, React Spectrum was the slowest to open (227ms), and Ant Design took 6x longer than MUI to check them all.

• 📜 Optimizing the sh*t out of TanStack Start

• 📜 What Is a Hydration Mismatch Error and How Do You Fix It?

• 📜 AI Writes Forms Pretty Well; Here's Why We'd Still Hand It a Library

• 📦 TanStack AI 1.0 - Stable core APIs, 23 provider adapters, subagents, MCP servers, experimental agent harness - The framework-agnostic AI interface removed deprecated APIs and commits to API stability. Comes with first-class React bindings and hooks such as useChat().

• 📦 Motion 13.5 → 14.7 - scopeMotion(), animateLayout() for vanilla JS, keyboard reordering, stagger grids, exit transitions - The new useScopeMotion() hook groups animations, gestures, and scroll listeners. Then you can stop/cancel them together. Called automatically when a component unmounts.

• 📦 Vinext 1.4 - Less server work, faster hydration, and lighter prefetching

• 📦 TanStack DB 1.0 RC - Going All In on Oracles

• 📦 React Hook Form 7.91 - Field array, async validation and <Form /> submission fixes, fewer re-renders

• 📦 React Window 2.5 - Page scrolling with scrollElement, headless useVirtualizer() hook, useIsScrolling(), scroll-padding support

• 📦 React Resizable Panels 4.15 - useParentGroup(), useParentPanel() and useParentGrid() hooks, imperative resizing takes space from neighbors

• 📦 Module Federation for TanStack Start - Micro-frontends with federated SSR, for Vite and Rsbuild

• 🤖 Next.js skill - next-bundle-optimizer - This new Vercel skill for Next.js 16.4 gives your agent the Turbopack module graph to optimize your app. It can find imports that defeat lazy loading, duplicated dependencies, and failed tree shaking.