[danabramov]

Hey, appreciate the reply! I’m sorry for lashing out as well.

Re: protocol, I see where you’re coming from although I can also see the team perspective and I kind of like it the way it is. The team’s perspective is that this isn’t a “protocol” in the sense that HTTP or such is. It isn’t designed to have many implementations emitting it. It is an implementation detail of React itself for which React provides both the “writer” and the “reader”. Those are completely open source — none of the RSC frameworks need to know the actual wire format. They just use the packages provided by React to read and write. Keeping the protocol an implementation detail of React (rather than an “open format”) lets React evolve it pretty substantially between versions with zero concerns about backwards compat. Which is still quite useful at this stage.

When you’re concerned about wire format not being an open protocol, it’s because you’re imagining it would be useful for others to read and write. But this doesn’t really buy you anything. If you’re making an RSC framework, you should just use the React packages for reading and writing. And if you’re not, there’s no reason to use this format. Eg if you make an RSC-like framework in another (non-JS) language, it’s better for you to use your own wire format that’s more targeted to your use case.

Does this help clarify it?

(Note I do think it would be beneficial to document the current version for educational reasons, which is part of why I made https://rscexplorer.dev, but that’s separate from wanting it to be fixed in stone as protocols must be. I think the desire for it to be fixed is rooted in a misconception that frameworks like Next.js somehow “rely” on the protocol and thus have “secret knowledge”, but that’s false — they just use the React packages for it and stay agnostic of the actual protocol.)