React 16 Updates

[Friss]

So now that React 16.3 has landed a few internal methods have changed so general-store will need some changes to stay up to date.

Component methods being deprecated

• componentWillMount

  • We should be able to just migrate over to componentDidMount without much difference.

• componentWillReceiveProps

  • getDerivedStateFromProps is another easy replacement here

• Registering subscriptions in componentWillMount

  • We can probably make use of the new create-subscription library to make this even better.

Other potienally useful things

• createRef
  • I noticed that we create refs on connect which actually throws a warning if you try to do that on a stateless component. We might be able to use the new ref API to make this more seamless. 🤷‍♂️
• context
  • There is the new context api which might be useful for providing the store connections. It looks pretty sweet.
• suspense
  • Being able to suspend some store subscriptions would be nice for fetching data.

@colbyr @marcneuwirth @Phoenixmatrix @WhoeverElseCaresAboutGeneralStore

[aem]

i wonder if it's worth releasing react 16 support as a new major version that would allow us to get rid of some of the legacy code in here. mixins are deprecated and could be removed, and without having dug too deeply into the code there are probably other bits that could be removed if we only had to support 16+ which would reduce the size of this package and potentially improve perf a bit. happy to look into it myself

[aem]

now that we have the hooks api....how much do we care about the other stuff? i'm happy to look into the other compatibility stuff as well since i'm familiar with the codebase now

[Friss]

The life cycle methods on the connect HOC will still be important to update. I don't see us getting rid of connect anytime soon.

context and suspense are also interesting but suspense for data loading is still TBD at the react level.

[aem]

I believe #83 should solve all of the issues here

[aem]

#83 did fix most of these. The outstanding issues are the new context API and suspense. Haven't put too much thought into those so I'll leave this open for now