Introduction

Preventing re-renders is one of performance issues in React. Smaller apps wouldn't usually suffer from such a performance issue, but once apps have a central global state that would be used in many components. The performance issue would become a problem. For example, Redux is usually used for a single global state, and React-Redux provides a selector interface to solve the performance issue. Selectors are useful to structure state accessor, however, using selectors only for performance wouldn't be the best fit. Selectors for performance require understanding object reference equality which is non-trival for beginners and experts would still have difficulties for complex structures.

React Tracked is a library to provide so-called "state usage tracking." It's a technique to track property access of a state object, and only triggers re-renders if the accessed property is changed. Technically, it uses Proxies underneath, and it works not only for the root level of the object but also for deep nested objects.

Prior to v1.6.0, React Tracked is a library to replace React Context use cases for global state. React hook useContext triggers re-renders whenever a small part of state object is changed, and it would cause performance issues pretty easily. React Tracked provides an API that is very similar to useContext-style global state.

Since v1.6.0, it provides another building-block API which is capable to create a "state usage tracking" hooks from any selector interface hooks. It can be used with React-Redux useSelector, and any other libraries that provide useSelector-like hooks.