React-tRace: A Semantics for Understanding React Hooks

2025/07/07 by Lee, Jay, Ahn, Joongwon, Yi, Kwangkeun
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #Software Engineering (cs.SE)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.05234

Abstract

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.

Citations

• A Core Calculus for Documents
• WebSpec: Towards Machine-Checked Analysis of Browser Security Mechanisms
• Model-View-Update-Communicate: Session Types meet the Elm Architecture
• The Essence of JavaScript

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