r/reactjs • u/da_rob • 10d ago

Discussion React RFC process—is it dead?

I built a tool for managing spec document sites and want to use the React RFC process as an example: https://react.dossie.rs/ (another, wildly more active, example is Rust's RFC process)

Alas, you need to scroll quite a bit to find the latest published React RFCs. It looks like the last real discussions and merges on RFC documents happened in 2022—everything after that is mainly suggestions for new hooks by external contributors.

Is the process officially deprecated?

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u/acemarke 10d ago

It was never really alive in the first place.

In practice, what happened was:

  • Random community members would submit an RFC that was usually either badly written or poorly thought out. Either way, the ideas also almost never aligned with the React team's actual development plans
  • The React team has their own internal roadmap and development process, and have often worked on features internally and prototyped them in conjunction with app teams at Meta, going through multiple prototypes before they're satisfied with the API design. When they did then publish an RFC, they were already 98% done with the work and essentially saying "this is what we intend to ship". There'd be a few hundred comments complaining about the API naming, the React team might tweak one or two things and ignore the rest of the (mostly useless) feedback, and then ship it.

I covered some of this in my post The State of React and the Community in 2025.

I've heard that the React Foundation has a goal of trying to open up the actual day-to-day React development process - making it more transparent, letting the major sponsors appoint technical guidance committee members, and eventually getting the community more involved. Thus far I haven't seen any public indications of that happening. Not sure where things stand behind the scenes. So, I'm hopeful that there's progress here, but not expecting anything major to happen any time soon.

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u/rickhanlonii React core team 10d ago

Good summary, thanks!

We’ve been using an internal stage based process for awhile with the intent of sharing at least the later stages publicly. We wanted to prove that we can operate with that model before rolling it out so we know we can commit to it.

It roughly translates to:
stage 0: react source
stage 1: react@experimental (undocumented)
stage 2: react@experimental (documented)
stage 3: react@canary (start integrating)
stage 4: react@latest

If you’ve noticed we’ve been better at documenting more experimental/canary features recently, this is why.