Next Js

The most important addition in React 18 is something we hope you never have to think about: concurrency. We think this is largely true for application developers, though the story may be a bit more complicated for library maintainers.

Concurrency is not a feature, per se. It’s a new behind-the-scenes mechanism that enables React to prepare multiple versions of your UI at the same time. You can think of concurrency as an implementation detail — it’s valuable because of the features that it unlocks. React uses sophisticated techniques in its internal implementation, like priority queues and multiple buffering. But you won’t see those concepts anywhere in our public APIs.

When we design APIs, we try to hide implementation details from developers. As a React developer, you focus on what you want the user experience to look like, and React handles how to deliver that experience. So we don’t expect React developers to know how concurrency works under the hood.

However, Concurrent React is more important than a typical implementation detail — it’s a foundational update to React’s core rendering model. So while it’s not super important to know how concurrency works, it may be worth knowing what it is at a high level.

A key property of Concurrent React is that rendering is interruptible. When you first upgrade to React 18, before adding any concurrent features, updates are rendered the same as in previous versions of React — in a single, uninterrupted, synchronous transaction. With synchronous rendering, once an update starts rendering, nothing can interrupt it until the user can see the result on screen.