Programming Tutorials

  You have built a robust Electron application. Logic is sound, the architecture is modular, and the UI is modern. But the moment you attempt to load a large dataset—say, a 50MB JSON file containing logs or analytical data—the application freezes. The CSS animations halt, the loading spinner sticks, and the window becomes unresponsive for a noticeable 500ms to 2 seconds. This is the classic "IPC Jank." It is not a React issue; it is a serialization bottleneck. This post details exactly why this happens and provides a production-ready implementation to offload serialization, keeping your Renderer at 60fps. The Why: The Hidden Cost of IPC When you transmit data between the Main process and the Renderer process in Electron using  ipcMain.handle  and  ipcRenderer.invoke , you are crossing a process boundary. Under the hood, Electron uses the  Structured Clone Algorithm  to serialize JavaScript objects into a format suitable for IPC transmission (often via named...

  Migrating legacy applications or integrating robust third-party libraries often forces a collision between two opposing philosophies: React's declarative state management and jQuery's imperative DOM manipulation. The most common symptom when dropping jQuery DataTables into a React 18 application is the "Cannot reinitialise DataTable" error or finding two pagination bars rendered on the screen. This is not a bug in the library; it is a fundamental conflict between the Virtual DOM and the browser DOM, exacerbated by React 18’s Strict Mode. The Root Cause: The Mutation War To understand the fix, you must understand the conflict. React's Job:  React maintains a Virtual DOM. When you render a  <table> , React believes it owns that DOM node and its children. It calculates diffs and applies updates batch-style. DataTables' Job:  When you initialize  $(selector).DataTable() , jQuery bypasses React entirely. It modifies the DOM directly—injecting search inputs,...