You’ll notice that in a lot of the Crank examples, I freely mix side-effects with the actual yielding/returning of elements. This is because Crank doesn’t treat side-effects as special. Given that rendering is a huge side-effect in and of itself, I always thought is was kind of unfair that React could peform them and the user couldn’t.

The reason this is possible is because Crank is executionally transparent. If you render a component, and that component calls refresh 4 times, the developer can know that the component has been updated 5 times. You get no such guarantees with React, and it will even go out of its way to make sure that you don’t put side-effects in your code by calling your components multiple times in development, which I think is crazy.