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Author: Thomas Hintz <t@thintz.com>
Date:   Thu Jul 23 20:09:02 2020 -0700

    Initial commit.

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+* Preface
+* Introduction
+It was the late 90's and I was just a kid visiting my Aunt and Uncle
+and their family in Denver. The days were packed with endless playing
+and goofing around. I didn't get to see my cousins much and we were
+having a good time. But it was the late 90's and the Internet was
+booming. And my cousin was in on it.
+
+A "startup", that's what he called it. I didn't understand any of what
+he was saying about it. Grown-up stuff. Then he showed us the webpage
+for the startup and I thought that was impressive.
+
+"How did you make that"? I asked him. I think he was a little confused
+at first about what I was even talking about but he quickly brought me
+over to the computer and showed me a screen full of text.
+
+"You just type HTML, that's how you make the webpage." I thought this
+was the coolest.
+
+"What do you type that into? What program is it? Can I do that?" He
+told me it was easy: just use Notepad. I wasn't going to let him go
+without some hook I could grab into this alien world. He told me it's
+really easy to learn: do an AOL search for "HTML tutorial".
+
+So began my journey with web development. I AOL searched my way
+through as many blinking text tutorials as I could find. It wasn't
+long until I was building AJAX. We had IE 5.5 and 6 and Mozilla
+Pheonix. And GMail came out. That changed things, now web apps were
+"legitimate."
+
+A lot of the technologies and libraries came and went over the years
+but one thing remained constant in large web apps: poor
+performance. From the very early days I was timing things with my stop
+watch. Sometimes things were slow and I had to understand why and how
+to fix them. Over the years I learned all about the browser's DOM and
+its APIs and how they work. I learned how jQuery worked and
+backbone.js and all the rest. I made apps that didn't lag or have
+jank.
+
+I was able to do this because I understood the performance
+implications of the tools and libraries I was using and I learned how
+to measure performance. I had discovered the recipe for
+high-performance code.
+
+And that is what this book is: a recipe for producing high-performance
+React applications. First, we learn how React works. Then we learn how
+to measure performance. And last we learn how to address the
+bottlenecks we find. Parts of any technical book will go stale as
+technology changes and that is no less true for this book. But what I
+hope you learn is not just the technical details but more importantly
+the method for writing high-performance code. The API might change but
+the method will remain the same.
+* Mini React
+Baking bread. When I first began to learn how to bake bread the recipe
+told me what to do. It listed some ingredients and told me how to
+combine them and prescribed times of rest. It gave me an oven
+temperature and a period of wait. It gave me mediocre bread of wildly
+varying quality. I tried different recipes but the result was always
+the same.
+
+Understanding: that's what I was missing. The bread I make is now
+consistently good. The recipes I use are simpler and only give ratios
+and general recommendations for rests and waits. So why does the bread
+turn out better?
+
+Before baking is finished bread is a living organism. The way it grows
+and develops and flavors depend on what you feed it and how you feed
+it and massage it, care for it. If you have it grow and ferment at a
+higher temperature and more yeast it overdevelops producing too much
+alcohol. If you give it too much time acidity will take over the
+flavor. The recipes I used initially were missing a critical
+ingredient: the rising temperature.
+
+But unlike a lot of ingredients: temperature is hard to control for
+the home cook. So the recipe can't just tell you exactly what
+temperature to grow the bread at. My initial recipes just silently
+made assumptions for the temperature, which rarely turn out to be
+true. This means that the only way to consistently make good bread is
+to have an understanding of how bread develops so that you can adjust
+the other ingredients to complement the temperature. Now the bread can
+tell me what to do.
+
+While React isn't technically a living organism that can tell us what
+to do it is, in its whole, a complex, abstract entity. We could learn basic
+recipes for how to write high-performance React code but they wouldn't
+apply in all cases and as React and things under it change our recipes
+would fall out-of-date. So like the bread, to produce consistently
+good results we need to understand how React does what it does.
+
+** Basic React
+
+Conceptually React is very simple. It starts by walking a tree of
+components and building up a tree of their output. Then it compares
+that tree to the tree currently in the browser's DOM to find any
+differences between them. When it finds differences it updates the
+browser's DOM to match its tree.
+
+But what does that actually look like? If your app is janky does that
+explanation point you towards what is wrong? No. It might make you
+wonder if maybe it is too expensive to re-render the tree or if maybe
+the diffing React does is slow but you won't really know. When I was
+initially testing out different bread recipes I had guesses at why it
+wasn't working but I didn't really figure it out until I had a deeper
+understanding of how making bread worked. It's time we build up our
+understand of how React works so that we can start to answer our
+questions with solid answers.
+
+React is made up of a few pieces: ~createElement~, ~render~, and
+reconciliation. The first building block is ~createElement~. While
+~createElement~ is itself unlikely to be a bottleneck it's a good to
+understand how it works so that we can have a complete picture of the
+entire process. The more black-boxes we have in our mental model the
+harder it will be for us to diagnose performance problems.
+
+*** ~JSX~
+
+But before we get to ~createElement~ we should talk about JSX. While
+not strictly a part of React it is almost universally used with
+it. And if we understand it then ~createElement~ will be less of a
+mystery since we will be able to connect all the dots.
+
+Before JSX the normal way of injecting HTML into the DOM was via
+directly utilizing the browser's DOM APIs. This was very cumbersome.
+The code's structure did not match the structure of the HTML that it
+output which made it hard to quickly understand what the output of
+a piece of code would be. So naturally programmers have been endlessly
+searching for better ways to mix HTML with Javascript.
+
+And this brings us to JSX. It is nothing new; nothing
+complicated. Forms of it have been made and used long before React
+adopted it. Now let's see if we can discover JSX for ourselves.
+
+To start with we need to create a data structure that both represents
+a DOM tree and can also be used to insert one into the browser's
+DOM. And to do that we need to understand what a tree of DOM nodes is
+constructed of. What parts do you see here?
+
+TODO include text element (Hello)
+TODO change to using objects instead of arrays?
+probably do after what we've already done
+
+{
+  type: 'h1',
+  props: { x: y },
+  children: []
+}
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC html
+<div class="header">
+  <h1>Hello</h1>
+  <input type="submit" disabled />
+</div>
+#+END_SRC
+
+I see three parts: the name of the tag, the tag's properties, and its
+children. Now how could we recreate that in Javascript?
+
+In Javascript we store lists of things in arrays and key/value
+properties in objects. Luckily for us Javascript even gives us literal
+syntax for both so we can easily make a compact DOM tree with our own
+notation.
+
+This is what I'm thinking:
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC javascript
+['div', { 'class': 'header' },
+  [['h1', {}, ['Hello']],
+   ['input', { 'type': 'submit', 'disabled': 'disabled' }, []]
+  ]
+]
+#+END_SRC
+
+As you can see we have a clear mapping from our notation to the
+original HTML. Our tree is made up of three element arrays. The first
+item in the array is the tag, the second is an object containing the
+tag's properties, and the third is an array of its children; which are
+all made up of the same three element arrays.
+
+The truth is though, if you stare at it long enough, although the
+mapping is clear, how much fun would it be to read and write that on a
+consistent basis? I can assure you, it is rather not fun. But it has
+the advantage of being easy to insert into the DOM. All you need to do
+is write a simple recursive function that ingests our data structure
+and updates the DOM accordingly. We will get back to this.
+
+So now we have a way to represent a tree of nodes and we
+(theoretically) have a way to get those nodes into the DOM. But if we
+are being honest with ourselves, while functional, it isn't a pretty
+notation nor easy to work with.
+
+And this is where our object of study enters the scene. JSX is just a
+notation that a compiler takes as input and outputs in its place a
+tree of nodes nearly identical to the notation we came up with! And if
+you look back to our notation you can see that you can easily embed
+arbitrary Javascript expression wherever you want in a node. As you
+may have realized, that's exactly what the JSX compiler does when it
+sees curly braces!
+
+There are three main differences between our data structure and the
+real one that JSX compiler outputs: it uses objects instead of arrays,
+it inserts calls to React.createElement on children, and spreads the
+children instead of containing them in an array. Here is what "real"
+JSX compiler output looks like:
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC javascript
+React.createElement(
+  'div',
+  { className: 'header' },
+  React.createElement('h1', {}, 'Hello'),
+  React.createElement(
+    'input',
+    { type: 'submit', 'disabled': 'disabled' })
+);
+#+END_SRC
+
+As you can see it is very similar to our data-structure and for the
+purposes of this book we will use our own simplified data-structure as
+it's a bit easier to work with. In practice they would behave the same
+in the ways that matter to us now.
+
+So now that we've worked through JSX we're ready to tackle
+~createElement~, the item on our way to building our own React.
+
+TODO JSX also does validation and escapes input to prevent XXS
+
+*** ~createElement~
+
+A tale of two trees.
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC javascript
+function createElement(node) {
+    if (typeof node === 'string') {
+        return {
+          type: 'TEXT_ELEMENT'
+    }
+    const [ tag, props, children ] = node;
+    const element = document.createDOMElement(tag);
+    for ([key, val] in props) {
+        element[key] = val;
+    }
+    children.forEach(createElement);
+}
+#+END_SRC
+
+* Rendering Model
+  React calls shouldComponentUpdate to know if it should re-render the
+  component. by default it returns true.
+
+  generally use PureComponent/React.memo
+* Diagnosing Bottlenecks
+* Reducing Renders
+* Improving DOM Merge Performance
+* Reducing Number of Components
+  higher-order components
+* Windowing
+* Performance Tools
+  trace from scheduler/tracing/profiler component
+* JS Performance Tools
+* Code Splitting
+  React.lazy, suspense
+
+  use on routes
+* Server Side Rendering
+* Concurrent Rendering
+* UX
+* JS Service Workers
+* Reconciliation
+  - diffing algorithm based on heuristics. generic algorithm is O(n^3)
+  - "Fiber" algorithm notes
+    - lists reordering without key means full list output/update
+    - type changes cause full re-render
+    - keys should be stable, predictable, unique
+