This is a small thing that once took me longer to debug than necessary, which is why it might be useful to some of you out there.
From time to time, we have that situation in a React application where it’s just not really avoidable that a small component has to accomplish a rather expensive computation. That’s what memoization is for, i.e. reusing the results of old computations when we know that these are still applicable.
React, in its functional approach, has three ways of memoiziating things, and for whole components there is React.memo(), while for usage inside a component we have the hooks React.useMemo() most commonly used for values or value-like objects, and React.useCallback() for functions. Because JavaScript is quite a functional languare, there is a rough equivalence between the latter two – but now I’m here to look into that.
// rather trivial function – these are equal React.useMemo(() => () => x, [x]); React.useCallback(() => x, [x]); // higher-order function – they are not! React.useMemo(() => higherOrderFunction(x), [x]); React.useCallback(higherOrderFunction(x), [x]);There are various such higher-order components that are avilable for developers to use re-existing logic. One such case is debouncing, i.e. when you expect state changes to sometimes come in very large batches, the most common case probably a <input/> field whose value is triggering a server request or something like that. Other common cases would be drag’n’drop interactions or window resizing.
With a useRef(), one can rather easily write such debouncing oneself (google it or ask in the comments), but there is lodash.debounce which take care of that with such a higher-component function.
const MILLISEC = 500;
const Component = () => {
const [value, setValue] = React.useState("");
const handle = React.useMemo(() => debounce(event => { ... }, MILLISEC), []);
return <input onChange={handle} value={value}/>;
};Now I don’t want to talk about the specific case of debounce() (but one can look at the source code to guess its doing), this is just an example. Third-party logic is helpful when not-reinventing-the-wheel, but you can’t be that sure about computational costs, especially when some of your dependencies might update in the future – so that might be a good point to use memoization without actually seeing the benefit in the time of developing. (*)
As Dmitir Pavlutin here states nicely for that specific case, you can not juse write useCallback(debounce(...), []) here in place of useMemo. It is rather trivial but you need to take care: The JavaScript engine will have no other option than to execute the debounce() on creation of the callback, it can not know that this is something to be evaluated later.
Anything that is not an arrow function () => { ... } or an old-school function() { ... } will be evaluated when the corresponding line is reached. The syntax does not allow anything to be wrapped around it in order to delay that execution to the first call.
So. Debounce might not be the most expensive thing, and in general one might not even need memoization, but if you do – always remember that something has to be a function in order for any of that to work.
(*) This is not a call for premature optimization.
It cannot be stressed enough that one shouldn’t wrap every single computation into a memoization in either case. Sure, one should care about useless computations as stated above, but always know that the memo thing itself is not free. So when in doubt, think about how to quantify your specific gain, e.g. via the React DevTools Profiler, the performance API or at least logging of Date.now() timestamps.
Also, only think about performance when doing so. If there is any case of “my application actually behaves differently” when using useMemo / useCallback, this is a red flag – drop the thought of optimization instantly and care about your overall architecture first.
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