Dev Summit 24 Back of the frontend session 1

JavaScript is garbage collected, but we can still get memory leaks. This session walks through what is and what isn’t collectable by the garbage collector. We also cover some easy fixes to ensure you don’t hold on to memory you don’t need anymore. Finally, we look at modern weak data structures that library authors can utilise to simplify internal memory management.

Signals, are reactive primitives for managing application state, increasingly found in programming languages and JavaScript frameworks.

In this session Lex Kuncevic covers their basic concepts and shows how they offer advantages over traditional state management and other reactive methods. We'll see practical examples demonstrating how Signals can simplify your code, improve performance, and how platforms like YouTube are already leveraging their power at scale.

And we’ll explore TC39’s efforts to standardise these concepts in ECMAScript, aiming for a more consistent experience across different frameworks and discover how frameworks like Angular, Solid, and Svelte use Signals, and learn how to apply these tools in your own projects.

The most talked-about news in the React community this year is probably the React Compiler. Everyone is looking forward to being saved from the re-render plague and never having to write useCallback/useMemo again.

But are we truly there yet? Can the React Compiler actually achieve those things? Do we need to do anything other than turning it on and enjoying a re-render-free life? I ran it on a few real-world apps to find the answer. Want to see the results?

In this talk, we’ll take a look at what the React Compiler is, what problems it solves, and how it performs on simple code examples and real-world applications.