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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. I'll have to spend some time mulling over this before the benefits sink in. It seems like a much more confusing and less composable API than recompose, which is how I add state, lifecycle, and other React class features to functional components. I've been completely avoiding React classes for a while now and using stateless components with recompose for over a year now, and I find it to be a wonderful architecture for component testability and reusability.

https://github.com/acdlite/recompose/blob/master/docs/API.md

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The author of recompose just end of life'd it today in favor of Hooks. Read his comment on the top of the recompose readme.

That author is Andrew Clark, who's also a React core team member and helped design and implement hooks in React :)

Still, I'll be looking into the hooks pattern and determining how it will work for my projects and especially how easy it will be to port my large number of reusable HOCs from recompose to React hooks.

Recompose is not really compatible with TypeScript (no clue about Flow). Render props are a good alternative but the nesting made composing a bit cumbersome. Hooks are easy to type and compose quite fine it seems.

I don't know much about TypeScript, but is any React HOC function composition compatible with it? It seems like it would be difficult for TypeScript to typecheck a compose function where you can do compose(hoc1, hoc2, hoc3), where each HOC renders a child component with some props added.

You can write HoC with working typings [1]. As far as I know the compose function is harder to type because of the varargs it uses (although I heard recent TS versions can actually handle that).

[1]: https://medium.com/@jrwebdev/react-higher-order-component-pa...

Right but with recompose you get extra wrapping components in your tree which is what they were trying to avoid.

What 'tree' are you referring to? Higher order components are just functional components that accept a component as a argument and return a new component. There aren't any additional nodes added to your VDOM unless you specifically make a HOC that does that.

The component tree.

Then yeah you are incorrect. You are not adding any additional components to the tree. Higher order components are just a design pattern. How you implement that pattern will decide on the component tree, but there is no additional "wrapping" penalty for using them.

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