Ryan and Sam use some recent Twitter conversation to guide a discussion about the design and purpose of React Server Components. They talk about how client trees and rendered on the server today, why a server-side rendered prepass is wasteful in light of RSC, how hydration of a client tree works, why RSC are never hydrated, how RSC is a purely additive technology, how server and client components can be interleaved, how RSC can be refreshed in-place without loss of any client state, how RSC fits into the React paradigm despite having a unique syntax and set of capabilities, and other topics.

Topics include:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 4:39 - How server-side rendering and hydration work today
• 14:51 - How RSC works, and why they’re never hydrated
• 24:48 - What is the React paradigm, and how RSC fits into it
• 27:54 - How RSC are revalidated
• 33:52 - Why the goal is not to eliminate Client components
• 38:53 - What it means for Server components and Client components to compose with each other

Links:

• Dan Abramov’s RSC AMA thread
• Illustration of server and client trees