Work

React-tRace: A Semantics for Understanding React Hooks: An Operational Semantics and a Visualizer for Clarifying React Hooks

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: React has become the most widely used web front-end framework, enabling the creation of user interfaces in a declarative and compositional manner. Hooks are a set of APIs that manage side effects in function components in React. However, their semantics are often seen as opaque to developers, leading to UI bugs. We introduce React-tRace , a formalization of the semantics of the essence of React Hooks, providing a semantics that clarifies their behavior. We demonstrate that our model captures the behavior of React, by theoretically showing that it embodies essential properties of Hooks and empirically comparing our React-tRace -definitional interpreter against a test suite. Furthermore, we showcase a practical visualization tool based on the formalization to demonstrate how developers can better understand the semantics of Hooks.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

DOI: 10.1145/3763067

Authors: Jay Lee, Joongwon Ahn, Kwangkeun Yi

Institution: Seoul National University

Language: English

Topic: Logic, programming, and type systems

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: National Research Foundation, National Research Foundation of Korea, Samsung

Awards: G1821537739, G2489221599, G30685149