React-devtools: Electron shell data transfer is lossy

[gaearon]

Since Electron shell uses JSON as transfer format, it loses some data, such as undefined values in objects, and sparsity of arrays. See my comments in https://github.com/facebook/react-devtools/pull/536#issuecomment-285235927.

I'm not sure how to solve this but it is confusing to have this disparity between shells.

[gaearon]

Maybe we should use something like https://github.com/cognitect/transit-js instead of JSON as transport?

[tlakomy]

transit-js is quite a lot of code (10K gzipped), maybe there's something smaller that can be used to achieve the same effect?

[gaearon]

Does it really matter though, if it’s only inside DevTools?

[tlakomy]

Not really, those are my web development habits speaking 😄

[jaredly]

yeah, transit could be a good thing to do

[davidfurlong]

@gaearon
I took a look at transit-js & have tried adding it to react-devtools.
Potential issues with it:

• https://github.com/cognitect/transit-js/issues/10 (I.e. converts undefined to null)
• It converts plain JS Objects into transit objects which are similar to ES6 Maps, and parsing them back to plain JS objects requires nested calls of http://cognitect.github.io/transit-js/classes/transit.html#methods_transit.mapToObject. May be introducing as many problems as it attempts to solve.

Are there any alternatives people know of?

[gaearon]

Interesting. I am not aware of alternatives but I'm fairly sure somebody must have solved this problem before.

[davidfurlong]

Theres also http://msgpack.org/ but that seems to be more concerned with compression than with consistency across null/undefined/NaN

[davidfurlong]

Okay I've modified the JSON2 parse and stringify functions to support undefined, NaN, Infinity, -Infinity. They were omitted from JSON because they are references to their global respectives (I think properties of the Number type). I think disregarding the potential security problems I read about/ spec will work for our use case.

https://github.com/davidfurlong/JSON-js

[bvaughn]

React DevTools has been rewritten and recently launched a new version 4 UI. The source code for this rewrite was done in a separate repository and now lives in the main React repo (github.com/facebook/react).

Because version 4 was a total rewrite, and all issues in this repository are related to the old version 3 of the extension, I am closing all issues in this repository. If you can still reproduce this issue, or believe this feature request is still relevant, please open a new issue in the React repo: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/new?labels=Component:%20Developer%20Tools