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#rsc#server#react#tanstack#client#don#more#years#bundle#router
Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Shipping moment for dates is a pain sure but that can be chunked and cached too? It's hard to imagine the benefit of reducing bundle by X kbs could really be worth doing a roundtrip to server whenever I need format a date in the UI.
RSC seems like something only library maintainers like, although I appreciate tanstack not forcing them down my throat like next I guess.
That aside, Next.js and the recent related vulnerabilities made me weary of RSC and I struggle to see the benefit of RSCs over the previous server side rendered and hydrated model. Chances are TanStack will do a better job than Vercel and yet the bumpy ride of the last few years tarnished the whole idea.
2. Cached bundles are cached. Network doesnt matter when its cached
3. Even bottom of the barrel motorolas are not wimpy nowadays
4. The obvious reasons why I dont want my aws box to do rendering is because it will need to everyone's rendering, and how big "everyone" is in not constant. It's another moving part in a complex system that can break. Also because I have to pay for the box.
5. Fast networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous
6. The performance gains are for a static site, which won't necessarily be representative of typical saas. How do you measure the risk and cost of my site breaking because my date rendering server got overloaded?
They are: https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
That said, RSCs and the rest of the "let's render a static site but let's also send a multimegabyte bundle for 'hydration'" is still wrong
You can send a tiny amount of JS from a CDN and render on the client. You will save money because the server is efficiently serving JSON instead of doing a gazillion calls and string interpolation per request. The user won't notice.
Also, now that the server is responding with JSON it doesn't need to run any JS at all, so you can rewrite the server in an even more efficient language and save even more money.
It's not: https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
The amount of times that the initial HTML, CSS and JS came through, but then choked on fetching the page content was insane. Staring at a spinner is more insulting than the page just not loading.
That being said, I'm not a huge fan of RSCs either. Dumping the entire VDOM state into a script tag then loading the full React runtime seems like a waste of bandwidth.
Also SSR, even in React, existed well before RSCs did, and that seems to be really what you are talking about.
https://tanstack.com/start/latest/docs/framework/react/guide...
AFAIK, at least when using TanStack Router, this RSC implementation seems just as capable as the others when it comes to reducing server round trips.
RSCs allow you to render the initial page with the content loaded right away.
That said, I am not sure about Tanstack’s implementation. Need to spend more time reading about this.
Here’s a nice post explaining why RSCs do what SSR cannot: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/server-components/
This is an argument for not putting all your JS in one monolithic bundle and instead parallelizing data loading and JS loading. It's not an argument for RSC.
But I do think they're a compelling primitive from a DX standpoint, since they offer more granularity in specifying the server/client boundary. The TanStack Composite/slots API is the real selling point, IMO, and as far as I can tell this API is largely (entirely?) thanks to RSCs.
The DX is smooth, the defaults are sane, and things generally makes sense if that makes sense. There are plenty of skills available so Claude Code and Codex know how to work with it too.
If you're maybe finding Next a bit bloated these days, I'd recommend giving this a try. Plus Tanner, the creator, responds to almost every mention on Twitter so it's easy to get eyeballs on issues that you might face. :)
I switched a middle sized app to Tanstack Router + Vite while I was walking my dogs. Then 30 minuts-1 hour QA and it was done. This should have never happened before AI.
(I did switch because I was tired of the bloated network tab with 100 unnecesary RSC calls, the 5 seconds lag when clicking on an internal link, the 10 seconds "hot reload" after a change... I'm on a M4 MAX with 64GB of ram....)
> How does this compare to Next.js App Router?
> Next.js App Router is server-first: your component tree lives on the server by default, and you opt into client interactivity with 'use client'.
> TanStack Start is isomorphic-first: your tree lives wherever makes sense. At the base level, RSC output can be fetched, cached, and rendered where it makes sense instead of owning the whole tree. When you want to go further, Composite Components let the client assemble the final tree instead of just accepting a server-owned one.
The sudden server-first change on Next.js App Router definitely trips some people, especially since React started as client-only library.
It's telling that we're 6 years in from announcement, and like 4 years in from the initial Vercel implementation (fuelled by the React core team working at Vercel) for this to land in the major React frameworks.
But nobody really wants this. There are better patterns surfaced in frameworks like SvelteKit and Solid. What people want is implicit RPC functions. That covers 90% of the use-case for RSC anyways.
My personal opinion is that all of this is BS anyways, and we're building on foundations that are fundamentally flawed. But I'm also well outside the JS ecosystem at this point, rejecting it for greener pastures (wasm). But that's besides the point.
Big ups to Tanner tho, Tanstack is the de facto best React framework at this point.
How does this work with Suspense (without Query) and the 'use' hook from React?
The other issue is, many websites are basically apps. The HTML is a byproduct, it isn't the main event. The template based systems are fine if you have mostly plain HTML with some interactivity sprinkled in, but for people who are building complex web apps, there is typically a tiny bit of HTML and a lot of logic.
The old template based systems fall to pieces for really complicated sites.
In regards to language, if you are going to pick a JITed or interpreted language, may as well pick one that has had a lot of effort put into making it fast, and the JS runtimes are really optimized by now. Java is faster, but Typescript is a much better language (and more type safe!) than Java.
If, instead, you wanted to say "can everyone please use the things I like?", I'm sorry but that's not how it works. You don't get to tell people what they should do just because you're "tired".
The idea that complexity arose out of nowhere and not because the web is doing things we couldn't have even imagined 10 years ago has always been wild to me.
My main complaint is that by and large, the people who are applying these technologies heavy-handedly are doing so because they either think it’s needed, or because they don’t understand that simpler tools exist that could solve their problem.
Mmm. Very nice.
Explicitly avoiding turning react into “webforms” and focusing on the actual point of RSC seems like the path RSC should have had from the beginning.
Magical RPC so you could “use server” and not bother to write an API properly was never the point of RSC, and the CVEs showed why it was a bad idea.
When RSC's were framed as a different way to write BFF's, it finally clicked for me.
If NextJS isn't nearly entirely replaced by TanStack Start universally in the next 2-3 years we'll know VC money has landed the final blow in 'VC vs Js Ecosystem'