React Three Ecosystem

by bpierre • 1 year ago

124 55 1 year ago

note three.js [1] has nothing to do with React out of the box though, this page highlights an atypical way of using three.js through a popular React binding.

[1] https://threejs.org/

jasonjmcghee• 1 year ago

You might be getting downvoted for saying it's an "atypical" way of using three.js. the pmnd.rs community (for example) is quite large.

I understand why people like the declarative nature of react three fiber, but it's quite unfortunate that it requires something like code sandbox to allow modification / working with it on the web- but that's by nature due to being react.

Vanilla three.js can be written surprisingly similarly, if you are disciplined about breaking things up into functions/components. And no react necessary / can embed a code editor and allow direct modification.

eyelidlessness3• 1 year ago

For what it’s worth, this is also true of whatever else one might express with JSX: imperative code (and syntax, and semantics) can be structured in a way that closely resembles declarative code… with discipline.

It’s doesn’t have to be especially onerous discipline if you embrace it, but it becomes considerably more onerous as it becomes more social: if some members of a team/contributors to a project embrace it more/less than others, that difference in commitment becomes a constant source of friction.

ttfkam2• 1 year ago

Exactly, as seen with Threlte as a counterpoint.

https://threlte.xyz/

throwaway3141552• 1 year ago

That all seemed fairly obvious to me.

talkingtab• 1 year ago

When I was new to the integration of threejs and react I found these examples to be just amazing.

https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/examples

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

The screenshots look cool, but (on my iPhone) the 1st one I tried to view was in a code sandbox that threw an error.

The examples here

https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes

seem to work great on my phone...

MortyWaves3• 1 year ago

R3F is great but almost all the code sandbox demos have been broken for years at this point

throwaway3141552• 1 year ago

I'm guessing that Safari on iOS doesn't support any of the necessary webgl here? Every example shows up with a blank component with a question mark emoji at the center.

hombre_fatal4• 1 year ago

React's threejs/pixijs bindings are a great example of what vdom diffing can let you do.

Since they bring their own reconcile(a, b, diff) function to React, these libs can turn:

    const world = new World()
    const player = new Player()
    world.add(player)
    // somehow wire up the code to keep 
    // player.pos updated

Into:

    const [x, setX] = useState(0)

    return <World>
      <Player x={x} />
    </World>

In other words, you write declarative code, and it does the hard imperative work of adding/removing/disposing/updating things for you.

Just like how it helps you sync your data model to underlying stateful DOM nodes; the idea can be applied on top of any stateful system.

cjonas2• 1 year ago

Just to clarify, you'd write the bottom code (declarative) and the library translates it to the above (imperative) code?

MortyWaves3• 1 year ago

That’s right

didgeoridoo• 1 year ago

This imperative/declarative shift happened as part of UIKit -> SwiftUI too. However, it’s still pretty well accepted that if you’re doing anything “complicated” you’re going to end up writing UIKit imperative code.

I wonder if there’s any research (PL or maybe even more philosophical) on whether declarative approaches can logically cover all imperative use cases.

Basically: is there something special about “verbs” (imperative) that let you do things that “nouns” (declarative) cannot, at least within reasonable verbosity constraints?

nicce• 1 year ago

Aren’t declarative approaches just abstractions over imperative? Somehow you need to get there. (Processor executes instructions, in the end)

eyelidlessness3• 1 year ago

A (the?) major area where this is generally considered unanswered, and active in PL research, is “effects” (as in, side-effects).

banalico• 1 year ago

I think there are declarative languages that are Turning-complete, like Prolog, etc. So declarative approaches should be equally good.

hombre_fatal4• 1 year ago

Yeah, one of the qualities of the abstraction is how often you have to reach for the escape hatch, how nice it is to use the escape hatch, and whether it's an escape hatch vs. just two clean modes of tooling working together.

SwiftUI has failed pretty much all of those for me.

In react-pixi / react-three, you have your declarative component tree alongside a `useTick`/`useFrame` function that you can use to do more surgical work, and it works well together. Each component can tap into the tick to update itself.

    const Enemy = ({ initalPos, size }) => {
      const [pos, setPos] = useState(initialPos)

      useTick(dt => {
        setPos(/* Move in a circle */)
      })

      return <Sprite 
        src="/enemy.png" 
        size={size} 
        pos={pos}
      />
    }

I've migrated a few medium-sized pixi/three projects to their React wrappers, and the code cleaned up so well that I could work on them again.

Before that, I'd tried modeling games in Elm and then using its port system to send the game state to JS which then updates the pixi/three world. But it's exactly this updateWorld(oldWorld, newState) that's hard to write, yet that's what these libs do for you.

gf000• 1 year ago

Well, you can interpret the program's text as a declarative (and completely static) approach to describe what will happen at runtime.

But you can actually see this dichotomy in template libraries, they usually have constructs making them fully Turing-complete (loops, conditionals, etc).

eyelidlessness3• 1 year ago

Minor nit, because this is one of my weird special interests: this (being render-agnostic) isn’t necessarily a property of React’s virtual DOM. It’s a property of JSX being explicitly specified without semantics.

For instance, Solid also supports custom JSX renderer, but doesn’t use a VDOM to achieve that.

I find it helpful to think of JSX as analogous to a macro (in the lispy sense of the term), except that its syntax and implementation are decoupled. Most compiler tooling assumes the implementation maps to a function call, but even that isn’t strictly required (and again, Solid is a counter example).

ttfkam2• 1 year ago

And JSX is not needed either, as seen with Threlte.

https://threlte.xyz/

When all you know is React, everything gets viewed through that limited lens.

hombre_fatal4• 1 year ago

JSX gets compiled to a tree of function calls, but the hard part is done using react (or solid, or svelte, or ...) to hook in to the lifecycle of nodes in that tree.

brundolf3• 1 year ago

Something I wish is that you could "render" JSX agnostically and just get a JSON data structure describing a tree of tags, which is not specific to the platform or even the framework, and then you could pass that off to whichever subsystem for whichever purpose (or even serialize it or send it over a wire). We wouldn't need separate build plugins for each JSX-using framework, you'd just pass them your data

darepublic• 1 year ago

This declarative system often is less intuitive once you get into the nitty gritty of things imo. Showing the hello world most basic example proves nothing

socalgal2• 1 year ago

It's worse IMO. In a real three.js example, to repo their example, you'd make one BoxGeometry and 2 Mesh(es) But that wouldn't be idomatic React so they don't show it.

jonas21• 1 year ago

It's great... except that it turns out to be a performance pitfall if the state needs to be frequently updated. The React Three Fiber docs mention this here:

https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/advanced/pitfalls#avoid-setstate-in...

To fix this, they suggest using useRef and manually updating the object. But then your code ends up just as complicated, if not more so, than if you had just stuck with vanilla three.js.

rafram• 1 year ago

Yeah, I can only imagine what removing an element from the middle of a thousand-element array of entities would do. This has always been a performance weak point for React, but React trees aren’t typically rebuilt from the root 60 times a second. With this, they are.

afavour• 1 year ago

Sadly I’ve lost the URL but there was once a great comparison of Svelte vs React for this exact functionality. The performance was orders of magnitude better IIRC.

React code looks great, the dev experience is fantastic. But user experience sometimes less so. Hooks kind of hide what’s going on.

baxuz• 1 year ago

The only way to have performant rendering in a React app is to eject from React's rendering pipeline — that is, to not use it at all.

State should basically only be used as "keyframes"

klysm• 1 year ago

I like react because it gives you escape hatches like this. You can take a range of approaches, starting with simple and declarative, only moving to gross and performant if required.

ericmcer• 1 year ago

Yeh that seems problematic because you no longer have access to the render loop, you are letting React manage your render loop which seems kinda problematic for a game where you want very granular control over what happens each iteration, fps, etc.

zeroq• 1 year ago

It's called Maslow's hammer.

If the only tool you have is React everything around you start looking remarkably similar to JSX.

nawgz• 1 year ago

Has ThreeJS updated to start using X3D (https://www.x3dom.org/) yet?

Taking a quick look at [the docs](https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/introduction) linked above, I see the use of Canvas. Fair enough.

I start using X3D at work in order to enable some cool functionality showing steps to build an assembly in 3D, and it's actually insane how high the performance is. It's all HTML components, so I wrote a super thin React wrapper (essentially the scene needs to be manually loaded once, that's about all) and have been cruising with that.

Effortless to fly, rotate, hide or highlight parts, decompose things into x3d assets, and so on.

It might have issues somewhere, I haven't widely tested browser compat or anything, but it's curious to me how little I see it versus how much I see ThreeJS when it seems that X3D is the more capable platform.

webprofusion2• 1 year ago

That's like asking "Has React updated to start using Angular".

andybak• 1 year ago

Even more than that. x3dom looks like the kind of thing that could use threejs under the hood.

GP - are we misunderstanding something here?

cyberax• 1 year ago

Another example of this is React-Native-Skia: https://shopify.github.io/react-native-skia/docs/getting-sta...

It uses a virtual DOM to diff the desired state and the current one: https://shopify.github.io/react-native-skia/docs/canvas/cont...

If you're interested how it's implemented, that's the source code: https://github.com/Shopify/react-native-skia/blob/main/packa...

NetOpWibby• 1 year ago

Is there a Svelte equivalent?

I found Threlte[1] recently and enjoy not having to write low-level Three.js code to make things happen.

---

[1] https://threlte.xyz

webprofusion2• 1 year ago

Cool but the docs links should take you to the docs, not the github source of the docs. Expected a demo link of each thing.

mawadev• 1 year ago

I tried to build a game with react expo and react three last year and it was painful to me. There were version mismatches and some features didn't work if I combined them in some ways that I needed sooner or later when trying to finish a project. I believe it is correlated with the fact I tried this on mobile, but maybe someone else has made the same experience with it. At this point I start to evaluate technologies end to end to not be surprised when projects break at a certain level of maturity or in size when they get close to release in terms of feature completeness.

gitroom• 1 year ago

been there - love how clean react-three looks at first but man, once you hit real perf walls, its like, why am i even using this lol. you think the push for these declarative libs is just for quicker onboarding or something deeper?

zubairq• 1 year ago

How does this compare to https://aframe.io ?

React Three Ecosystem

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