React-tRace: A Semantics for Understanding React Hooks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lee, Jay, Ahn, Joongwon, Yi, Kwangkeun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Lee, Jay
Ahn, Joongwon
Yi, Kwangkeun
author_facet Lee, Jay
Ahn, Joongwon
Yi, Kwangkeun
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05234
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle React-tRace: A Semantics for Understanding React Hooks
Lee, Jay
Ahn, Joongwon
Yi, Kwangkeun
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
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.
title React-tRace: A Semantics for Understanding React Hooks
topic Programming Languages
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05234