Historically, one of the differences that made hybrid mobile apps feel a bit “off” was that there would be lag when handling taps on UI elements with a straightforward click event handler. Libraries such as Fastclick were created to mitigate this by using raw touch events to immediately trigger the event handlers. Though they worked for basic uses, they added JavaScript execution overhead for touch events, which leads to jank.

More recently, both Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS have removed this limitation for pages that are not scalable. That was the fundamental reason why there was a delay for single taps — there was no way to know if the user was trying to do a double-tap gesture or a single tap, so the browser would have to wait after the first tap to see if another came.

I assumed that this would apply to web views embedded within apps, but I was disappointed to see that Quip's behavior did not improve on iOS 9.3 or 10.0 (we have our own Fastclick-like wrapper for most event handlers, but it didn't apply to checkboxes, and those continued to be laggy). Some more research turned up that the improvement did not apply to UIWebView (the older mechanism for embedding web views in iOS apps — WKWebView is more modern but still has some limitations and thus Quip has not migrated to it).

The WebKit blog post about the improvements included some links to the associated tracking bugs (as previously mentioned, WKWebView is entirely open source, which continues to be nice). Digging into one of the associated commits, it looked like this was a matter of tweaking the interaction between multiple UIGestureRecognizer instances. Normally the one that handles single taps must wait for the one that handles double taps to fail before triggering its action. Since the double tap one takes 350 milliseconds to determine if a tap is followed by another, it needs that long to fail for single taps. The change that Apple made was to disable this second gesture recognizer for non-scalable pages.

UIWebView is not open source, but I reasoned that its implementation must be similar. To verify this, I added a small code snippet to dump all gesture recognizers for its view hierarchy (triggered with [self dumpGestureRecognizers:uiWebView level:0]:

-(void)dumpGestureRecognizers:(UIView *)view level:(int)level {
    NSMutableString *prefix = [NSMutableString new];
    for (int i = 0; i < level; i++) {
        [prefix appendString:@"  "];
    }
    NSLog(@"%@ view: %@", prefix, view);
    if (view.gestureRecognizers.count) {
        NSLog(@"%@ gestureRecognizers", prefix);
        for (UIGestureRecognizer *gestureRecognizer in view.gestureRecognizers) {
            NSLog(@"%@   %@", prefix, gestureRecognizer);
        }
    }
    for (UIView *subview in view.subviews) {
        [self dumpGestureRecognizers:subview level:level + 1];
    }
}

This showed that the UIWebView contains a UIScrollView which in turn contains a UIWebBrowserView. That view has a few gesture recognizers, the most interesting being a UITapGestureRecognizer that requires a single touch and tap and has as the action a _singleTapRecognized selector. Sure enough, it requires the failure of another gesture recognizer that accepts two taps (it has the action set to _doubleTapRecognized, which further makes its purpose clear).

<UITapGestureRecognizer: 0x6180001a72a0; 
    state = Possible; 
    view = <UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>; 
    target= <(action=_singleTapRecognized:, target=<UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>)>; 
    must-fail = {
        <UITapGestureRecognizer: 0x6180001a7d20; 
            state = Possible; 
            view = <UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>; 
            target= <(action=_doubleTapRecognized:, target=<UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>)>; 
            numberOfTapsRequired = 2>,
        <UITapGestureRecognizer: 0x6180001a8180; 
            state = Possible; 
            view = <UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>; 
            target= <(action=_twoFingerDoubleTapRecognized:, target=<UIWebBrowserView 0x7f844a00aa00>)>; 
            numberOfTapsRequired = 2; numberOfTouchesRequired = 2>
    }>

As an experiment, I then added a snippet to disable this double-tap recognizer:

for (UIView* view in webView.scrollView.subviews) {
    if ([view.class.description equalsString:@"UIWebBrowserView"]) {
        for (UIGestureRecognizer *gestureRecognizer in view.gestureRecognizers) {
            if ([gestureRecognizer isKindOfClass:UITapGestureRecognizer.class]) {
                UITapGestureRecognizer *tapRecognizer = (UITapGestureRecognizer *) gestureRecognizer;
                if (tapRecognizer.numberOfTapsRequired == 2 && tapRecognizer.numberOfTouchesRequired == 1) {
                    tapRecognizer.enabled = NO;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        break;
    }
}

Once I did that, click events were immediately dispatched, with minimal delay. I've created a simple testbed that shows the difference between a regular UIWebView, a WKWebView and a “hacked” UIWebView with the gesture recognizer. Though the WKWebView is still a couple of milliseconds faster, things are much better.

Note that UIWebBrowserView is a private class, so having a reference to it may lead to App Store rejection. You may want to look for alternative ways to detect the gesture recognizer. Quip has been running with this hack for a couple of months with no ill effects. My only regret that is that I didn't think of this sooner, we (and other hybrid apps) could have had lag-free clicks for years.

I recently ran into an interesting quirk when using Performance.now() to measure long-ish intervals in Quip's web app. Since it does not seem to be broadly known, I thought I would document it.

To mitigate the possibility of self-induced DDoS attacks, I recently added duplicate request detection to Quip's model layer data loading mechanism. Since we pretty aggressively cache loaded data, repeated requests for the same objects would indicate that something is going wrong. I therefore added a client-side check for the exact same request being issued within 60 seconds of the first occurrence. If it triggered, it would send a diagnostic report to our error tracking system.

This turned up some legitimate bugs (e.g. two independent code paths racing to trigger loads) as well as some false positives (e.g. retries of requests that failed should be allowed). After pushing the fixes and tweaks to the detection system, I was left with a few puzzling reports. The report claimed that a duplicate request had occurred within a very short interval, but based on other events it looked like the requests had been several minutes (or even hours) apart.

When I looked at the reports more carefully, I saw that the long time interval was always bracketed by a disconnect and reconnect of the Web Socket that we use for sending real-time updates. I hypothesized that this may have been a laptop whose lid was closed and later re-opened. Taking a look at how I measured elapsed time between requests, I saw that this was computing the delta between to high-resolution timestamps returned by Performance.now(). I was then able to reproduce this scenario locally by comparing wall-clock elapsed time with high resolution elapsed time while my computer was asleep (to see it in action, see this simple test bed). I initially did this in Chrome, but Safari and Firefox seem to have the same behavior.

The fix was switch to using Date.now(), which otherwise worked equally well for this use-case. We didn't actually need the high-resolution guarantees of Performance.now() — the reason why it was used in the first place is because the code already had a timestamp with it in place that was used for measuring load request-to-response time. The same code runs in on our desktop app (where load times can be sub-millisecond) and so the high resolution was needed for that use case.

I am definitely not the first to run into this; I have found a few off-hand mentions of this behavior. For example, see this Stack Overflow comment and this post on elm-dev. Curiously, neither the currently published version of the time specification nor the latest draft seem to indicate that this may be a possibility. Per the spec, Peformance.now() is supposed to return the difference between the time of the call and the time origin, and presumably the origin is fixed.

As to the specifics of why this happens, I spelunked through Chrome's codebase a bit. The Performance.now implementation calls monotonicallyIncreasingTime which uses base::TimeTicks::Now which uses the CLOCK_MONOTONIC POSIX clock. I wasn't able to find any specific gotchas about macOS's implementation of that clock, but Apple does have a tech note that says that “timers are not accurate across a sleep and wake cycle of the hardware” so this is not a surprise at that low level. Within the Chrome project it is also known that base::TimeTicks is unreliable across sleep intervals. Though it's common to think of the browser environment as being very high level and abstracted away from the hardware and operating system, small nuances such as this one do sometimes leak through.

I previously described how adding native popovers and modal dialogs to Quip’s hybrid desktop apps helped them to blend in and avoid the “uncanny valley” of web-based apps that don’t quite feel right. Another area that we focused on was the experience of creating a new window, especially during application startup. This is the first impression for a user, and thus informs how they will perceive the rest of the app.

In theory launching should be fast — not much happens when a new window is created:

1. An NSWindow is instantiated.
2. A WebView is added to the window.
3. The web view is directed to load the HTML file from the app’s bundle. That file serves as the “shell” for the HTML, JavaScript and CSS that are used for the UI.
4. Once a signal from the JS that it has been initialized is received, the native side instructs it to render the desktop (or other initial object, when restoring the previous application state).

Here’s a short screen recording showing the application launch sequence for a small account:

End-to-end it doesn’t feel too slow, but there’s a lot of flashing and incremental rendering of the UI, which definitely feels “webby” as opposed to native. To make it a bit easier to understand what is going on, here’s a version that has been slowed down¹ by a factor of 3:

The visual progression can be broken down into 4 stages:

1. Blank window appears
2. Basic app “chrome” appears (without any user data)
3. Data and images begin to appear
4. Rendering is complete

In a native app, none of the intermediate stages are visible, thus they have much of a “snappy” feeling when creating a new window. Incremental rendering is normally desirable on the web if waiting on resources that require a network round-trip. In this case the overall time is short enough that intermediate states which only appear for a few frames (such as the one shown below) are distracting rather than giving a sense of progress.

To avoid showing an entirely blank window (stage 1), instead of showing the window immediately, we modified the new window sequence to keep the window hidden until the ReactDOM.render() call for the application’s root view finished. This does mean that there is a slightly longer delay between the app being launched and the window appearing. However, since other things are happening (dock icon bouncing, menu bar changing), and the delay is on the order one to two hundred milliseconds, it's not noticeable.

The initial rendered view was very empty since it didn’t have any of the data for the user’s desktop or inbox. On the web we “seed” this data in the initial HTML response to avoid the extra network round-trip to fetch it. We had assumed that loading data from the local database is so fast that such an optimization was unnecessary, and instead it could be loaded on demand like everything else. It was indeed quite fast, but it still took tens of milliseconds, which led to frames that appeared incomplete. Once we added the same “seeding” capability to the desktop app (the request to render the initial object also included all the data necessary for the view), almost everything appeared at once, skipping over most of stage 3.

The reason why I said almost everything appeared at once is because some images were still taking a few extra frames to show up. The odd part was that these images were local static assets, and thus should have been readily available (e.g. the folder and sidebar icons in the screenshot above). Further, we inline the images as data: URIs into our main stylesheet (an optimization originally meant for the website, but carried over to the desktop app since it didn’t seem like it would hurt). Thus loading of the images should not involve any more I/O once the stylesheet was loaded and parsed. Evidently that was not the case — even when using data: URIs there was an asynchronous “fetch” and decompress step for rendering the image.

When experimenting with creating additional windows, we noticed that in those cases the images do appear instantaneously. We thus concluded that they must still end up in WebKit’s memory cache. We wanted to simulate this behavior for even the first window, and in the absence of an explicit cache hinting API, we added a “cache warmer” to invoke early on during application startup. It creates a WebView and loads a simple static HTML file that references our stylesheet and has dummy markup corresponding to our most common views. The view doesn’t need to be added to a window or otherwise shown, and it gets disposed of 10 seconds after startup.

Once all those changes are implemented no incremental rendering is visible (slowed down version). None of modifications that were necessary were particularly complex, but they do show the extra attention to detail that is necessary to get a hybrid web app to feel more native.

1. During development I often end up taking screen recordings and then stepping through them frame-by-frame to get a better understanding of the rendering sequence. I usually use ScreenFlow, but QuickTime Player can do this too.

During the summer of 2015 I was investigating an annoying bug in Quip where our message list would not stay “bottom-anchored” in some circumstances¹. Unfortunately I was only able to trigger it on our live production site, not on my local development setup. Though Chrome’s developer tools are quite nice, I did not have the necessary ability to rapidly iterate on the code in order to further investigate the bug. I had in the past pushed alternate builds our staging site to debug such production-only issues, but that would still take several minutes to see the results of every change.

My next thought was that I could instead try to reproduce the bug in our soon-to-be-released desktop app. The app can use local (minimally processed) JavaScript while running against production data. Unfortunately the bug did not manifest itself in our Mac app. I chalked this up to rendering engine differences (the bug was only visible in Chrome, and our Mac app uses a WebKit-backed WebView). I then tried our Windows app (which uses the same rendering engine as Chrome via the Chromium Embedded Framework), but it didn’t happen there it either. I was forced to conclude that the bug was due to some specific behavior in our website when running against production data, not something in the shared React-based UI.

As I was wishing for a way to use JavaScript and CSS from my laptop with production data (for security reasons my local Quip server cannot connect to the production databases) I remembered that Gmail used to have exactly such a mode. As I recall it, you could start a local CaribouGmail server, go to your (work) Gmail instance and append a special URL parameter that would cause the JavaScript from the local server to be requested instead². With most of Gmail’s behavior being driven by the client-side JavaScript (with the server serving as an API endpoint) this meant that it was possible to try out pretty complex changes on your own data without having to “deploy” them.

I considered adding this mode to Quip, but that seemed scary, security-wise, since it was effectively intentional cross-site scripting. It also would have meant waiting for the next day’s production push (and I wanted to solve the problem as soon as possible). However, it then occurred to me that I didn’t actually need to have the server change it behavior; I could instead write a Chrome extension which (via the webRequest API) would “graft” the local JavaScript and CSS files from my local server onto the production site when loaded in my browser.

I had hoped that the extension could modify the HTML that is initially served and replace the JavaScript and CSS URLs, but it turns out the webRequest API cannot modify the HTTP response body. What did work was to intercept the JavaScript and CSS requests before they were sent to our CDN and redirect them to paths on my local server. Chrome would initially flag this as being insecure (since we use HTTPS in production, and the redirected URLs were over plain HTTP), but it is possible to convince it to load the resources anyway.

Once I had the necessary tooling and ability to iterate quickly, fixing the bug that prompted all this was pretty straightforward (it was caused by the “mount point” system that we used to incrementally migrate our website to React, but that’s a whole other blog post). Since then it’s come in handy in debugging other hard-to-recreate problems, and for measuring JavaScript performance against more realistic data. It did briefly break when we added a Content Security Policy (CSP) — since we were loading scripts from an unknown domain the browser was correctly blocking the “grafted” response. However, the webRequest API also allows the extension to edit the response headers, thus it was straightforward to have it intercept the main HTML page request and strip the CSP header.

The extension that I wrote to accomplish this is very barebones and hardcodes a bunch of Quip-specific logic and URLs, thus is not easily shared. However, I have recreated a simplified version of it and put it in my web experiments repository. There is also a demo site that it can be applied to.

1. Yet more developer time spent faking something that should be a built-in capability, further confirming Bret’s observation.
2. For a bit more history: back in 2005 I was using Greasemonkey to hack Gmail left and right. When I talked to the Gmail team about this approach (versus working in my 20% time to add those features to Gmail directly) I rationalized it as “Greasemonkey lets me do UI experiments on the real email in my account with minimal lag, instead of needing to wait for code reviews and production pushes.” Darick Tong (a Gmail engineer) took this feedback to heart and added the custom JavaScript mode. Unfortunately by that point I had mostly moved on from Gmail hacking (Reader was keeping me plenty busy, JavaScript-wise), so I never got to actually use it.

Quip’s desktop apps are hybrid apps: both the Windows and Mac apps are composed of a web React-based UI talking to our C++ Syncer library, along with some platform-specific glue code. While this allows us to support two additional platforms with a small team we knew that architecting the apps in this way would run the risk of not “fitting in” with other Mac OS X or Windows applications.

To see if we could mitigate this problem, we started to enumerate what makes an app feel like “just a web view.” There were obvious things like responsiveness, working offline, and using platform conventions (e.g. a menu bar on the Mac). After thinking about it more, we also observed that native apps often have multiple windows, whereas web apps are bound to a single browser tab. This wasn’t just a matter of multiple windows showing Quip documents (something that did not seem too difficult to accomplish), but also all of the child windows that a native app would have (especially popovers and sheets on Mac OS X).

We did have equivalents in our React “parts” library that we used in our website, but visually they didn’t match the native versions, and they felt very much bound by the enclosing rectangle of the web view. This was especially apparent with popovers that were triggered near the edge of the web view; one would expect them to “spill out” of the window but instead they would awkwardly position themselves “inward” to avoid getting clipped by the edges. This triggered an “uncanny valley” effect where the illusion of a native app would be broken.

All of this was very much on my mind about a year ago as I was building up the foundations of our desktop apps. Though seemingly just a “polish” kind of detail, it seemed like supporting child windows would require some design trade-offs that would be easier to make early on, rather than retrofit later. My first thought was that we should define all of the popover and dialog content in a very declarative manner, thus allowing to later change how they were rendered. For modal dialogs this worked pretty well, since their content tended to be pretty simple.

For example, a deletion confirmation dialog would be represented as:

parts.spec.newPanel()
    .addSection(parts.spec.newTitleSection(_("Delete Chat Room")))
    .addSection(parts.spec.newSection()
        .addMessage(_("If you delete this chat room, you will…")))
    .addSection(parts.spec.newSection()
        .addDefaultButton(_("Hide"), function() {
            ...
        })
        .addButton(_("Delete for all %(count)s people", {"count": count}), function() {
            ...
        })
        .addCancelButton(_("Cancel"), function() {}))

It was then a pretty straightforward mapping to generate an NSAlert instance that would fit right in on a Mac app (we support multiple modal dialog “runners”: one that creates a React version and another that passes it off to the platform native code).

However, once we began to implement more and more popovers, the sheer variety of the kinds of controls used within them became apparent.

In addition to all these widgets popovers also often had custom validation logic (e.g. the “Create” button in the “New Folder” popovers is grayed out while the title is empty) and dynamic updates (rows representing users show presence). A declarative system would need to be quite complex in order to support all of these concepts. Furthermore, implementing each control multiple times was going to slow down development significantly, and the benefits seemed minimal (for example there are no platform conventions to follow for how to show a user row — that is a Quip-specific concept).

Since we already had a separation between the content of popovers and their frames (indeed, any React-based popover could be shown in a modal dialog instead), I wondered if it was possible to show the contents in a separate web view contained within an NSPopover instead. That way the frame would be native, and it could be positioned outside the main web view, but we would not have to re-implement all of our widgets.

To see if such an approach was feasible, I needed to answer two questions: “Could React render into another window?” and “Could we create another web view that was visible in the main window's JavaScript context?”

The reason why I wanted React to render into another window from the child was that this way all JavaScript execution would still happen in a single window, which would make this code path much more similar to regular popover rendering. To test this out, I tried something along these lines (in the web version of the app):

var otherWindow = window.open();
var container = otherWidow.document.createElement("div");
otherWindow.document.body.append(container);
ReactDOM.render(<parts.PanelContents .../>, container);

To my pleasant surprise this worked (see a simple test harness here), including event handlers (that would be invoked for events in the child window, but the handler would run in the parent window). It turned out that the React team had added support for rendering into other windows quite early, though they had iframes in mind. The only (in retrospect obvious) gotcha was that the child window also needed to have the stylesheet injected into it.

I then turned to the second question — was it possible to intercept the window.open() call when running in the native app and create a popover instead? Since the call seemingly did nothing, I assumed that it was up to the application to handle it. After going through the 6 delegates that WebView supports I came across the webView:createWebViewWithRequest: method of WebUIDelegate. That was indeed invoked for window.open calls, and it was up to the application to create the child WebView and put it somewhere in the view hierarchy. Thus it was a matter of creating the view, a view controller to own it, and setting that as the contentViewController of a NSPopover that was also created then. I’ve created a simple Xcode project that shows all of the pieces working together.

Once I had determined that there were no fundamental roadblocks, a bunch more supporting code was necessary (e.g. for passing around the popover anchor bounds and content size to the native side and for notifying the JS side that a popover was dismissed), but no more showstopper issues appeared. The same “runner” concept was used to allow popovers to be shown in a React frame on the web but a native frame on the Mac (Windows does not have a native popover container window and we have not yet implemented a custom version there).

As I was wrapping up, I was reminded of a Chrome tech talk that I had watched in early 2010 when I was first joining the Chrome team. A surprising amount of time (i.e. greater than 0 in a 30 minute overview talk) was spent discussing the implementation details of <select> popup menu rendering. I hadn’t really thought of select menus as being a particularly tricky part of HTML to implement, but the fact that they extend outside of the main window led to extra layers in the class hierarchy (RenderWidget vs. RenderView) as well as other complexity. Just as most web developers don’t really think about <select> as being all that special, I’m sure most of our users don’t think twice about our popovers sticking out outside of the main window. However, every time I open one I think of all of the things that had to be wired up for it appear the way it does and I smile a little bit.

Earlier this year I posted about WKWebView communication latency and how it’s not quite as good as UIWebView (when using WKScriptMessageHandler, the officially sanctioned mechanism). There have a been a few developments in this area, so an update seems warranted.

Things appear to be promising for iOS 9: In late June Mark Lam fixed ScriptMessageHandlerDelegate::didPostMessage to reuse JSContext instances across calls. Now that I had an Apple engineer to bug appeal to, I filed a bug asking for same fix to be applied to [WKWebView evaluateJavaScript:completionHandler:], to help with execution round trips. Mark kindly obliged, and the fix was picked up (merged?) for iOS 9 beta 4.

Earlier, in April, Ted Suzman emailed me to ask if I’d considered modifying document.title to send data from the JS side (since it’s mirrored on the native side as the title property on the WKWebView, which can be observed via KVO). I implemented this approach and it seemed to work quite well. Ted also suggested trying location.replace (instead setting location.hash), which (though it should be equivalent) ends up being slightly faster for both UIWebView and WKWebView (implementation).

Ted’s messages got me thinking about other WKWebView properties that could be manipulated from the JS side, and so I took a closer look at the delegate protocols. The webView:runJavaScriptAlertPanelWithMessage:initiatedByFrame:completionHandler: method on WKUIDelegate caught my eye. We don’t use window.alert() in Quip, but this seemed like it would provide a way of getting a string from JS to native with minimal overhead (as previously mentioned, Quip encodes all JS ↔ native communications as strings already, so we don’t want the web view to do any other serialization for us). Better yet webView:runJavaScriptTextInputPanelWithPrompt:defaultText:initiatedByFrame:completionHandler: (which maps to window.prompt()) allows the native side to return a value to the JS side. I implemented these two approaches too.

Here are the results from testing the various communication mechanisms using my test bed. Tests were run on iPad Air 2’s, one running iOS 8.4 and another running iOS 9.0 beta 5

Quip is still using UIWebView since we’re still supporting iOS 7 (and supporting both web views did not seem like it would be worth the complexity). However, once iOS 9 is released we will most likely drop iOS 7 support, so it’s good to know that switching to WKWebView will not pose an unreasonable latency burden (though it remains to be seen if the selective swizzling and subview spelunking that we do will carry over).

tl;dr: react-closure-compiler is a project that contains a custom Closure Compiler pass that understands React concepts like components, elements and mixins. It allows you to get type-aware checks within your components and compile React itself alongside your code with full minification.

Late last year, Quip started a gradual migration to React for our web UI (incidentally the chat features that were launched recently represent the first major functionality to be done entirely using React). When I started my research into the feasibility of using React, one of my questions was “Does it work with the Closure Compiler?” At Quip we rely heavily on it not just for minification, but also for type annotations to make refactorings less scary and code more self-documenting¹, and for its many warnings to prevent other gotchas in JavaScript development. The tidbits that I found were encouraging, though a bit sparse:

• An externs file with type declarations for most of React's API²
• A Quora post by Pete Hunt (a React core contributor) describing React as “closure compiler compatible”
• React's documentation about refs mentions making sure to quote refs annotated via string attributes³

In general I got the impression that it was certainly possible to use React with the Closure Compiler, but that not a lot of people were, and thus I would be off the beaten path⁴.

My first attempt was to add react.js (the unminified version) as source input along with a simple “hello world” component⁵. The rationale behind doing it this way was that, if React was to be a core library, it should be included in the main JavaScript bundle that we serve to our users, instead of being a separate file. It also wouldn't need an externs file, since the compiler was aware of it. Finally, since it was going to be minified with the rest of our code, I could use the non-minified version as the input, and get better error messages. I was then greeted by hundreds of errors and warnings which broadly fell into three categories:

1. “illegal use of unknown JSDoc tag providesModule” and similar warnings about JSDoc tags that the React source uses that the Closure Compiler didn't understand
2. “variable React is undeclared” indicating that the Closure compiler did not realize what symbols react.js exported, most likely because the module wrapper that it uses is a bit convoluted, and thus it's not obvious that the exported symbols are in the global scope
3. “dangerous use of the global this object” within my component methods, since the Closure Compiler did not realize that the functions within the spec passed to React.createClass were going to be run as methods on the component instance.

Since I was still in a prototyping stage with React, I looked into the most minimal set of changes I could do to deal with these issues. For 2, adding the externs file to our list helped, since the compiler now knew that there was a React symbol and its many properties. This did seem somewhat wrong, since the React source was not actually external, and it was in fact safe to (globally) rename createClass and other methods, but it did quieten those errors. For 1 and 3 I wrote a small custom warnings guard that ignored all “errors” in the React source itself and the “dangerous use of global this” warning in .jsx files.

Once I did all that, the code compiled, and appeared to run fine with all the other warnings and optimizations that we had. However, a few days later, as I was working on a more complex component, I ran into another error. Given:

var Comp = React.createClass({
    render: function() {...},
    someComponentMethod: function() {...}
});
var compInstance = React.render(React.createElement(Comp), ...);
compInstance.someComponentMethod();

I was told that someComponentMethod was not a known property on compInstance (which was of type React.ReactComponent — per the externs file). This once again boiled down to the compiler not understanding that the React.createClass construct (i.e. that it defined a type). It looked like I had two options for dealing with this:

1. Add a @suppress {missingProperties} annotation at the callsite, so that the compiler wouldn't complain about the property that it didn't know about
2. Add a @lends {React.ReactComponent.prototype} annotation to the class spec, so that the compiler would know that someComponentMethod was indeed a method on components (this seemed to be the approach taken by some other code I came across).

The main problem with 2 is that it then told the compiler that all component instances had a someComponentMethod method, which was not true. However, it seemed like the best option, so I added it and kept writing more components.

After a few more weeks, when more engineers started to write React code, these limitations started to chafe a bit. There was both the problem of having to teach others about how to handle sometimes cryptic error messages (@lends is not a frequently-encountered JSDoc tag), as well as genuine bugs that were missed because the compiler did not have a good enough understanding of the code patterns to flag them. Additionally, the externs file didn't quite match with the latest terminology (e.g. React.render's signature had it both taking and returning a ReactComponent). Finally, the use of an externs file meant that none of the React API calls were getting renamed, which was adding some bloat to our JavaScript.

After thinking about these limitations for a while, I began to explore the possibility of creating a custom Closure Compiler pass that would teach it about components, mixins, and other React concepts. It already had a custom pass that remapped goog.defineClass calls to class definitions, so teaching it about React.createClass didn't seem like too much of a stretch.

Fast forward a few weeks (and a baby) later, and react-closure-compiler is a GitHub project that implements this custom pass. It takes constructs of the form:

var Comp = React.createClass({
    render: function() {...},
    someComponentMethod: function() {...}
});

And transforms it to (before any of the normal compiler checks or type information was extracted):

/**
 * @interface
 * @extends {ReactComponent}
 */
function CompInterface() {}
CompInterface.prototype = {
    render: function() {},
    otherMethod: function() {}
};
/** @typedef {CompInterface} */
var Comp = React.createClass({
    /** @this {Comp} */
    render: function() {...},
    /** @this {Comp} */
    otherMethod: function() {...}
});
/** @typedef {ReactElement.<Comp>} */
var CompElement;

Things of note in the transformed code:

• The CompInterface type is necessary in order to teach the compiler about all the methods that are present on the component. Having it as an @interface means that no extra code ends up being generated (and the existing code is left untouched). The methods in the interface are just stubs — they have the same parameters (and JSDoc is copied over, if any), but the body is empty.
• The @typedef is added to the component variable so that user-authored code can treat that as the type (the interface is an implementation detail).
• The @this annotations that are automatically added to all component methods means that the compiler understands that those functions do not run in the global scope.
• The CompElement @typedef is designed to make adding types to elements for that component less verbose.

A bit more formally, these are the types that the compiler knows about given the Comp definition:

• ReactClass.<Comp>, for the class definition
• ReactElement.<Comp> for an element created from that definition (via JSX or React.createElement())
• Comp for rendered instances of this component (this is subclass of ReactComponent).

This means that, for example, you can use {Comp} to as a @return, @param or @type annotation for functions that operate on rendered instances of Comp. Additionally, React.render invocations on JSX tags or explicit React.createElement calls are automatically annotated with the correct type.

To teach the compiler about the React API, I ended up having a types.js file with the full API definition (teaching the compiler how to parse the module boilerplate seemed too complex, and in any case the React code does not have type annotations for everything). For the actual type hierarchy, in addition to looking at the terminology in the React source itself, I also drew on the TypeScript and Flow type definitions for React. Note that this is not an externs file, it's injected into the React source itself (since it's inert, it does not result in any output changes). This means that all React API calls can be renamed (with the exception of React.createElement, which cannot be renamed due to the collision with the createElement DOM API that's in another externs file).

Having done the basics, I then turned to mixins (one of the reasons why we're not using ES6 class syntax for components). I ended up requiring that mixins be wrapped in a React.createMixin(...) call, which was introduced with React 0.13 (though it's not documented). This means that it's possible to cheaply understand mixins: [SomeMixin] declarations in the compiler pass without having to do more complex source analysis.

The README covers more of the uses and gotchas, but the summary is that Quip itself is using this compiler pass to pre-process all our client-side code. The process of converting our 400+ components (from the externs type annotations) took a couple of days (which included tweaks to the pass itself, as well as fixing a few bugs that the extra checks uncovered).

The nice thing about having custom code in the compiler is that it provides an easy point to inject more React-specific behavior. For example, we're heavy users of propTypes, but they're only useful when using the non-minified version of React — propTypes are not checked in minified production builds. The compiler pass can thus strip them if compiling with the minified version.

Flow was the obvious alternative to consider if we wanted static type checking that was React-aware. I also more recently came across Typed React. However, extending the Closure Compiler allows us to benefit from the hundreds of other (non-React) source files that have Closure Compiler type annotations. Additionally, the compiler is not just a checker, it is also a minifier, and some minification passes rely on type information, thus it is beneficial to have type information accessible to the compiler. One discovery that I made while working on this project is that the compiler has a pass that converts type expressions to JSDoc, and generally seems to have some understanding of type expressions that (at least superficially) resemble Flow's and TypeScript's. It would be nice to have one type annotated codebase that all three toolchains could be run on, but I think that's a significant undertaking at this point.

If you use React and the Closure Compiler together, please give the pass a try (it integrates with Plovr easily, and can otherwise be registered programatically) and let me know how it works out for you.

1. I continue to find doing large-scale refactorings less scary in our client-side code than ones in our server-side Python code, despite better test coverage in the latter environment.
2. I ended up contributing to it a bit, as we started to use less common React APIs.
3. Spelunking through React's codebase that I did much later turned up keyOf and many other indicators that React was definitely developed with unquoted property renaming minification in mind.
4. Indeed the original creator of the React externs file has indicated that he's no longer using the combination of React/Closure Compiler.
5. Which used JSX, but that was not of interest to the Closure Compiler: it was transformed to plain JavaScript before the compiler saw it.