Never heard of Signals[1] until now, thanks. But it makes me nervous with how much influence it has from React and Vue, and the way React and Vue do things. These are not the be all end all methods of reactivity, and I can't help but think if there's going to be an official language feature implemented for this, there needs to be room for other voices to be heard that have zero influence from React/Vue. Maybe there's still time since it's Stage 1.
I wouldn’t say signals is coming from React. If anything React is the latest to the party and being dragged there reluctantly by where the tech community is going. They’ve mostly been resisting the movement towards signals because it undermines a lot of the arguments they have made for their virtual dom, synthetic event system, and rerender all the things dogma. Solidjs is much much more in the signals camp. Angular, Vue, Svelte, etc also recognize the need for this sort of reactivity.
React could be argued to have abandoned the fight for being the best client side framework technically (though they have dominance pragmatically). They are really all focused on Vercel’s Nextjs/SSR/SSG/RSC stuff in recent years
Also shoutout to Solid's inspiration, S.js[0].
Just FYI, Signals are actually derived from Observables in KnockoutJS. React was originally created as a response to the first wave of JavaScript Frameworks which heavily relied on two-way binding-- remember the whole emphasis on "unidirectional flow"?
Signals recently became more popular as people observed the performance and DX that they made possible in SolidJS. Solid's creator, Ryan Carniato, has acted as a bit of an evangelist for them-- even working closely with the Angular team.
Whoops, this sentence accidentally got left out as I was moving it around for formatting:
"Preact, Qwik, Svelte, and Angular all quickly followed suit and unlocked huge performance benefits."
From your own link:
> The current draft is based on design input from the authors/maintainers of Angular, Bubble, Ember, FAST, MobX, Preact, Qwik, RxJS, Solid, Starbeam, Svelte, Vue, Wiz, and more…
What other voices would you like to get feedback from?