This is, like, we're trying to figure out what the database story around it here is. But it's a very novel invention and we're dying to see what people build with it. And there's so much more.
And when I say so much more, I mean Cloudflare has a deep portfolio of services, and you should totally go check it out. There are also so many cool things we are building that I'm not allowed to tell you yet. And what you can do is buy me a beer right after the conference and start talking a little bit. But I can't do it on screen! Hey, boss manager! Anyway. Anyway.
So you can go explore more at workers.Cloudflare.com. There's a startup, a CLI you use, and you can start writing JavaScript and it works. It will be getting better soon. But the vision really for workers and I assume all these other run times, right, is I want to stop calling it serverless. What I really like to imagine it as is like it's one server that envelopes the world like a buckyball with your database all surrounded. Anyone taking a photo of this? I look like a maniac, I'm sure. So you can envelop the entire world in this mesh. Right now it's 250 cities. It could be thousands in the future. We might give you some hardware that you can just chuck behind your washing machine and then you can FTP into it and set your website up just like the 90s. It would be great. So edge networks like this are such a good fit for the React streaming model. It's instantaneous. We can give experiences that are way better than anyone's had in the past 30 years. The web is getting old.
So, while there is going to be an incremental story where we improve all these things, what I really think is going to happen is that this is a big reset moment for React. Of course all the popular libraries will still work with the existing model. The team itself is collaborating with CSS and JS library authors, and library authors. They work well. But I think there's potential for us to do more. For example, Node doesn't run on these networks, which means Next.js doesn't run on it. I don't know. Next.js, the folks might make some changes there. But it sure would be nice if we started exploring. If we had to build something from scratch, streaming as a model. data fetching, way more lightweight libraries, and the ability to talk to APIs, like durable objects and KB stores. What could we do? I want to leave you on that note. I want you to start thinking about what this means for React on the ecosystem. A lot of the complaints about React have been, like, bigger bundles, and over-engineering, and JavaScript fatigue. But maybe this is a moment for us to start removing the fatigue, to, like, simplifying removing the parts that we have needed just to be able to have a competent stack. And maybe we could have, like, a different story. I don't know. I'm going to try. I expect everyone else to because I don't usually ship my libraries anymore. But there are folks out there who will look at me and be like I find challenge accepted. And I totally would like to see that. There's some links. Well, you can just literally Google React18 working group and you can find a bunch of details about what I was talking about today, how to upgrade to the new API, guides for library authors for how to upgrade their authors, how you could possibly build a new JavaScript runtime if the next big serverless entrepreneur is in the crowd here somewhere or watching this in the future. There's a whole list of like... Sebastian from the team wrote down a list of things you can do to make it better. And yeah. I look forward to it.
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