'withProps' on 'View' component crashes in release mode

[hellogerard]

This one is a doozy. I had a simple block component built by styling a standard View component. This was the basic idea:

const Block = withProps({
  style: { height: 100, width: 100, backgroundColor: 'blue' },
})(View);

export default Block;

This worked fine in debug mode. In release mode, withProps caused a crash. Here is the trace from Xcode:

2017-09-20 21:55:25.918 [error][tid:com.facebook.react.JavaScript] undefined is not an object (evaluating 'this._currentElement = element')
2017-09-20 21:55:25.921 [fatal][tid:com.facebook.react.ExceptionsManagerQueue] Unhandled JS Exception: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'this._currentElement = element')
2017-09-20 21:55:25.929 RecomposeBug[67656:3088671] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'RCTFatalException: Unhandled JS Exception: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'this._currentElement = element')', reason: 'Unhandled JS Exception: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'this._curre..., stack:
RCTView@32853:13
mountComponent@31640:44
mountComponent@31358:53
mountChildren@32740:66
initializeChildren@32819:45

Here is the same trace when running in debug mode, but with NODE_ENV = production.

It also works if I use a different component (i.e. Text, ScrollView). So this is probably a super-edge case, but still I found it in the wild. The fact that it only occurs in release mode made this one very hard to track down.

I have a repo you can use to reproduce. If you open it in Xcode and hit Play, it will crash. But you can also just wrap a View in withProps anywhere and it seems to crash. I also noticed that wrapping a View in onlyUpdateForPropTypes also has this same issue.

https://github.com/hellogerard/RecomposeBug

EDIT: Meant to add my packages:

"react": "16.0.0-alpha.12",
"react-native": "0.48.3",
"recompose": "^0.25.0"

[conrad-vanl]

Potential insight:

React-Native uses a different component for View whether it's in release mode or not: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/Libraries/Components/View/View.js#L137-L140

RCTView references the native component, which I'm pretty sure does not have a render method defined on the prototype, which might point to some earlier issues, such as: #489

[istarkov]

Any ideas about how we could check that its a class component ?https://github.com/acdlite/recompose/blob/master/src/packages/recompose/isClassComponent.js
Something like prototype has keys other than etc
We would like to accept a PR

[conrad-vanl]

@istarkov I'd love to put some thoughts against. Can you give some background about how you're using isClassComponent and why?

[istarkov]

Mostly for this optimization https://github.com/acdlite/recompose/blob/4b37008169c193e30014f49073173ce23b61af90/src/packages/recompose/isReferentiallyTransparentFunctionComponent.js

Idea is that instead of creating new react elements on every HOC for some hocs we can replace element creation with direct function call on production env

As an example mapProps - it's functional HOC, let's have

compose(
  mapProps(fnA),
  mapProps(fnB)
)(Comp)

in dev it wil generate something like

const CompB = (props) => <Comp {...fnB(props)} />
const CompA = (props) => <CompB {...fnA(props)} />

But in release it will generate

const CompB = (props) => <Comp {...fnB(props)} />
const CompA = (props) => CompB(fnA(props))

So for components with isReferentiallyTransparentFunctionComponent true we do this optimisation as this reduces Vtree size and removes a call to createElement

[istarkov]

render check was added by author of preact to make sure that recompose can work with preact too. Before we used check on some internal react class property which was not documented and I'm not sure it exists in React 16

[istarkov]

@developit may be you have any ideas about how to check that something is React/Preact class component without breaking compatibility with preact? As seems like render can be not in the prototype (we have issues that some people binds render moving it out of prototype, or like in issue above no render on native view)

[istarkov]

PS. I dont think that this optimisation somehow improves performance of real apps, may be in very rare usecases. Also there are babel plugins exists as I know with this optimization inside, in that case we can recommend to use babel plugin and remove it from code.

[istarkov]

oops we cant, this is runtime optimisation :-(

[istarkov]

#538 we removed Eager optimisations in 0.26 must work now