Preventing race conditions with main -> renderer ipc and React state mutation?

[polar shuttle]

A core part of the project I'm working on involves the main process sending messages to the renderer, which then get logged and shown in the UI. The sending of messages between the main and renderer processes is something I seem to understand, but I'm encountering issues regarding React's useEffect cleanup where I unregister the previously registered IPC events to avoid memory leaks. As a result, when multiple messages are sent to the window's webContents in quick succession, and then React state is mutated, the useEffect cleanup runs which unregisters the listeners and results in most of the messages not having a callback associated and are simply lost to the void.

I understand why this is happening, my useEffect is mutating state which causes it to cleanup and unregister the listeners before re-rendering again, I just don't understand any other way to do this. I suppose the bigger question overall is how can I ensure messages sent from the main process will actually be handled if the very place I register them (useEffect) is responsible for un-registering them any time there is a state change/re-render? I'm unsure if I'm missing an obvious piece to this, but I can't think of another way to reliably send messages from main to renderer with this setup.

I've taken a look at as many resources, blog posts, docs, and example projects as I could find and they all seem to do the same thing: setup the listener in the useEffect and then remove it in the cleanup. This works fine for main -> renderer messages that aren't sent at a high rate, but in my use case the rate at which messages (logs) get sent is both high and not really predictable, as it's caused by any number of external events.

I may very well just not understand what the appropriate React/state management architecture for this is, as it seems like the use of a single useEffect to manage the IPC listeners and mutate the state is a pretty clear conflict, but I'm not sure what an alternative structure would be.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated!

[polar shuttle]

An update to this and for anyone else who may be in a similar situation:

I decided to try moving state outside of the component and into a store, specifically using zustand. So far it seems to be working well, the top level module code registers the listeners and then updates the state directly. Then use the store in the react component and everything seems to be working fine so far.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right way to do it, I haven't been able to find many resources regarding how to deal with this. At its core the problem still exists:

If you register an IPC listener in a useEffect and provide a cleanup to unregister it, when that listener is called you mutate state, thus calling the cleanup method and unregistering the listener, you lose out on any additional IPC events that were called in quick succession to the first one the moment you mutate a piece of state.

If anyone has advice for this I'd still love to hear it. As for the code changes if anyone is interested:

[balmy plover]

hey @polar shuttle ! useEffect's return callback is called before the effect is re-run or the component is unmounted. If you're putting your remove listener logic in the return callback, you want to avoid adding anything to that useEffect's dependency array. That way, your listener won't get removed as a result of any state changes.

In order to remove logs from your useEffect's deps array, you can pass an updater function to setState. ie:

function onLogCreated(logData) {
  setLogs(prevLogs => [...prevLogs, logData])
}

React recommends passing an updater function instead of the new state directly if the next state depends on the current state

[polar shuttle]

Oh my gosh thank you so much! This entire time I was thinking that this was on the simpler side of things and the fact that everything I looked up and read, and how no one seemed to address this, that I must not be understanding something right - and that's exactly what it was. I appreciate you taking the time to read through all that and help me out. Looks like I've got some more reading to do to understand React a bit more now 😄