Framework Briefing — React 18 General Availability
React 18 became generally available on 29 March 2022 with concurrent rendering primitives, automatic batching, streaming Suspense, and a new root API, requiring coordinated upgrades across front-end stacks.
Executive briefing: The React team shipped React 18 on , introducing the concurrent renderer and new APIs that reshape how applications schedule UI work.
Feature highlights
- Concurrent rendering. New scheduling architecture powers
startTransition,useDeferredValue, and non-blocking updates. - Automatic batching. State updates inside promises, timeouts, and event handlers are batched by default, affecting rendering behaviour.
- Streaming Suspense. Server-side rendering gains selective hydration and streaming Suspense boundaries for faster page loads.
- New root API.
createRootreplaces legacy rendering entry points, impacting integration code in frameworks and design systems.
Adoption steps
- Upgrade shared component libraries and ensure they export React 18-compatible bundles before application rollout.
- Audit user flows for behavioural changes caused by automatic batching and concurrency, adding transitions where appropriate.
- Enable the streaming SSR architecture in Node and edge runtimes to capture performance wins while monitoring resource usage.