Radix Drawbacks (React Server Components, etc.)

[SachaG]

This isn't really a targeted question, more of a general interrogation, so I hope this is the right place for this kind of discussion.

I love Radix but lately I've been running into two pretty big drawbacks that are making me reconsider my use of Radix, or of any similar React library for that matter:

1. Radix adds a lot of extra components to the component tree, which can make debugging your own code a lot more challenging.
2. With more components being destined to run on the server only (Astro, React Server Components, etc.) I am wondering if this is compatible with using Radix components – in other words, I assume using Radix inside a component would force it to be hydrated?

One solution I'm currently considering is replacing Radix with a Vanilla JavaScript (i.e. non-React) library. On the plus side this should work for server components (at least I know it's a pattern supported by Astro), but I'm not sure if it'll be compatible with client components that are managed by React.

The other solution would be pure-CSS UI components, which are becoming more and more doable as CSS evolves. But the accessibility story can still be lacking…

Anyway I realize this is a bit outside the scope of Radix itself, but before I go down the road of migrating out of Radix (even if only partially) I wanted to know if the Radix team had any thoughts about addressing these issues.

[benoitgrelard]

Hey Sacha!

We haven't looked much into the server components story. From what I understand about RSC though, I would think most of the Radix components wouldn't really be a good fit for RSC as most of them are highly interactive.

Maybe that story would change once React adds first class support for mutations, but for now I feel like most of our components would need to be client components.

[jdiponziano]

@benoitgrelard couldn't you separate out the pieces, some server some not? For example DialogTitle is static content and could be rendered as a RSC but the Root needs to be client side that accepts children?