[RFC] Zero-runtime CSS-in-JS implementation

[brijeshb42]

What's the problem? 🤔

This RFC is a proposal for implementing a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS solution to be used in a future major version of Material UI and Joy UI.

TLDR: We are planning to develop a custom implementation of a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library with ideas from Linaria and Compiled.

With the rising popularity of React Server Components (RSCs), it’s important that we support this new pattern for all components that are compatible. This mainly applies to layout components such as Box, Typography, etc., as they are mostly structural and the only blocker for RSC compatibility is the use of Emotion.

Another aspect is the use of themes. Currently, they need to be passed through a Provider component (especially if an application is using multiple themes) which uses React Context. RSCs do not support states/contexts.

In the last major version, we moved the styling solution to Emotion for more performant dynamic styles. Since then, Internet Explorer has been deprecated, enabling us to go all in on CSS Variables. We already use this with an optional provider (CSS theme variables - MUI System).

What are the requirements? ❓

• Minimal runtime for peak performance and negligible JS bundle size as far as the runtime is concerned.
• Supporting RSC as part of the styling solution means no reliance on APIs unavailable to server components (React Context).
• Keep the same DX. You should still be able to use the sx prop along with container-specific props like <Box marginTop={1} />etc.
• It should be possible to swap out the underlying CSS-in-JS pre-processor. We have already explored using emotion as well as stitches, as mentioned below.
• Source map support. Clicking on the class name in the browser DevTools should take you to the style definitions in the JS/TS files.
• Minimal breaking changes for easier migration.

What are our options? 💡

We went through some of the existing zero-runtime solutions to see if they satisfy the above requirements.

1. vanilla-extract - This ticks most of the boxes, especially when used along with libraries like dessert-box. But its limitation to only be able to declare styles in a .css.ts file felt like a negative point in DX.
2. Compiled - Compiled is a CSS-in-JS library that tries to follow the same API as Emotion which seems like a win, but it has some cons:
   • Theming is not supported out of the box, and there’s no way to declare global styles.
   • Atomic by default. No option to switch between atomic mode and normal CSS mode.
3. Linaria - Linaria in its default form only supports CSS declaration in tagged template literals. This, along with no theming support as well as no way to support the sx prop led us to pass on Linaria.
4. PandaCSS - PandaCSS supports all the things that we require: a styled function, Box props, and an equivalent of the sx prop. The major drawback, however, is that this is a PostCSS plugin, which means that it does not modify the source code in place, so you still end up with a not-so-small runtime (generated using panda codegen) depending on the number of features you are using. Although we can’t directly use PandaCSS, we did find that it uses some cool libraries, such as ts-morph and ts-evaluate to parse and evaluate the CSS in its extractor package.
5. UnoCSS - Probably the fastest since it does not do AST parsing and code modification. It only generates the final CSS file. Using this would probably be the most drastic and would also introduce the most breaking changes since it’s an atomic CSS generation engine. We can’t have the same styled() API that we know and love. This would be the least preferred option for Material UI, especially given the way our components have been authored so far.

Although we initially passed on Linaria, on further code inspection, it came out as a probable winner because of its concept of external tag processors. If we were to provide our own tag processors, we would be able to support CSS object syntax as well as use any runtime CSS-in-JS library to generate the actual CSS. So we explored further and came up with two implementations:

1. emotion - The CSS-in-JS engine used to generate the CSS. This Next.js app router example is a cool demo showcasing multiple themes with server actions.
2. no-stitches - Supports the styled API from Stitches. See this discussion for the final result of the exploration.

The main blocker for using Linaria is that it does not directly parse the JSX props that we absolutely need for minimal breaking changes. That meant no direct CSS props like <Box marginTop={1} /> or sx props unless we converted it to be something like <Component sx={sx({ color: 'red', marginTop: 1 })} />. (Note the use of an sx function as well.) This would enable us to transform this to <Component sx="random-class" /> at build-time, at the expense of a slightly degraded DX.

Proposed solution 🟢

So far, we have arrived at the conclusion that a combination of compiled and linaria should allow us to replace styled calls as well as the sx and other props on components at build time. So we’ll probably derive ideas from both libraries and combine them to produce a combination of packages to extract AST nodes and generate the final CSS per file. We’ll also provide a way to configure prominent build tools (notably Next.js and Vite initially) to support it.

Theming

Instead of being part of the runtime, themes will move to the config declaration and will be passed to the styled or css function calls. We’ll be able to support the same theme structure that you know created using createTheme from @mui/material.

To access theme(s) in your code, you can follow the callback signature of the styled API or the sx prop:

const Component = styled('div')(({ theme }) => ({
  color: theme.palette.primary.main,
  // ... rest of the styles
}))
// or
<Component sx={({ theme }) => ({ backgroundColor: theme.palette.primary... })} />

Although theme tokens’ structure and usage won’t change, one breaking change here would be with the component key. The structure would be the same, except the values will need to be serializable.

Right now, you could use something like:

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    // Name of the component
    MuiButtonBase: {
      defaultProps: {
        // The props to change the default for.
        disableRipple: true,
        onClick() {
          // Handle click on all the Buttons.
	}
      },
    },
  },
});

But with themes moving to build-time config, onClick won’t be able to be transferred to the Button prop as it’s not serializable. Also, a change in the styleOverrides key would be required not to use ownerState or any other prop values. Instead, you can rely on the variants key to generate and apply variant-specific styles

Before

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    MuiButton: {
      styleOverrides: {
        root: ({ ownerState }) => ({
          ...(ownerState.variant === 'contained' &&
            ownerState.color === 'primary' && {
              backgroundColor: '#202020',
              color: '#fff',
            }),
        }),
      },
    },
  },
});

After

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    MuiButton: {
      variants: [
        {
          props: { variant: 'contained', color: 'primary' },
          style: {
            backgroundColor: '#202020',
            color: '#fff'
          },
        },
      ],
    },
  },
});

Proposed API

The styled API will continue to be the same and support both CSS objects as well as tagged template literals. However, the theme object will only be available through the callback signature, instead of being imported from a local module or from @mui/material :

// Note the support for variants
const Component = styled('div')({
  color: "black",
  variants: {
    size: {
      small: {
	fontSize: '0.9rem',
	margin: 10
      },
      medium: {
        fontSize: '1rem',
	margin: 15
      },
      large: {
	fontSize: '1.2rem',
	margin: 20
      },
    }
  },
  defaultVariants: {
    size: "medium"
  }
})
// Or: 
const ColorComponent = styled('div')(({ theme }) => ({
  color: theme.palette.primary.main
});

The theme object above is passed through the bundler config. At build-time, this component would be transformed to something like that below (tentative):

const Component = styled('div')({
  className: 'generated-class-name',
  variants: {
    size: {
      small: "generated-size-small-class-name",
      medium: "generated-size-medium-class-name",
      large: "generated-size-large-class-name",
    }
  }
});
/* Generated CSS:
.generated-class-name {
  color: black;
}
.generated-size-small-class-name {
  font-size: 0.9rem;
  margin: 10px;
}
.generated-size-medium-class-name {
  font-size: 1rem;
  margin: 15px;
}
.generated-size-large-class-name {
  font-size: 1.2rem;
  margin: 20px;
}
*/

Dynamic styles that depend on the component props will be provided using CSS variables with a similar callback signature. The underlying component needs to be able to accept both className and style props:

const Component = styled('div')({
  color: (props) => props.variant === "success" ? "blue" : "red",
});

// Converts to:
const Component = styled('div')({
  className: 'some-generated-class',
  vars: ['generated-var-name']
})

// Generated CSS:
.some-generated-class {
  color: var(--generated-var-name);
}

// Bundled JS:
const fn1 = (props) => props.variant === "success" ? "blue" : "red"

<Component style={{"--random-var-name": fn1(props)}} />

Other top-level APIs would be:

1. css to generate CSS classes outside of a component,
2. globalCss to generate and add global styles. You could also directly use CSS files as most of the modern bundlers support it, instead of using globalCss.
3. keyframes to generate scoped keyframe names to be used in animations.

Alternative implementation

An alternative, having no breaking changes and allowing for easy migration to the next major version of @mui/material is to have an opt-in config package, say, for example, @mui/styled-vite or @mui/styled-next. If users don’t use these packages in their bundler, then they’ll continue to use the Emotion-based Material UI that still won’t support RSC. But if they add this config to their bundler, their code will be parsed and, wherever possible, transformed at build time. Any static CSS will be extracted with reference to the CSS class names in the JS bundles. An example config change for Vite could look like this:

import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";
// abstracted plugin for vite
import styledPlugin from "@mui-styled/vite";
import { createTheme } from "@mui/material/styles";

const customTheme = createTheme({
  palette: {
    primary: {
      main: '#1976d2',
    },
  },
  components: {
    MuiIcon: {
      styleOverrides: {
        root: {
          boxSizing: 'content-box',
          padding: 3,
          fontSize: '1.125rem',
        },
      },
    },
  }
  // ... other customizations that are mainly static values
});

// https://vitejs.dev/config/
export default defineConfig(({ mode }) => ({
  plugins: [
    styledPlugin({
      theme: customTheme,
      // ... other tentative configuration options
    }),
    react(),
  ]
}));

For component libraries built on top of Material UI, none of the above changes would affect how the components are authored, except for the need to make it explicit to users about their theme object (if any), and how that should be imported and passed to the bundler config as discussed above.

Known downsides of the first proposal

Material UI will no longer be a just install-and-use library: This is one of the features of Material UI right now. But with the changing landscape, we need to compromise on this. Several other component libraries follow a similar approach.
Depending on the bundler being used, you’ll need to modify the build config(next.config.js for Next.js, vite.config.ts for Vite, etc.) to support this. What we can do is provide an abstraction so that the changes you need to add to the config are minimal.

Resources and benchmarks 🔗

Playground apps -

1. Next.js
2. Vite

Related issue(s)

• [system] Support new style engine that generates static CSS files at build time #34826

[mwskwong]

<Component sx={({ theme }) => ({ backgroundColor: theme.palette.primary... })} />

I'm a bit concerned about how the theme is accessed. Right now, if Component is a client component while the parent is a server component, we can't access the theme like this because functions are not serializable.

[acomanescu]

@mwskwong We should use CSS vars. A lot faster and easier to write. We'll miss the typecheck, but we'll have to live with that.

<Component sx={{ backgroundColor: 'primary' }} />

[brijeshb42]

@mwskwong This is what you write in your code which will then be replaced at build time (dev or prod) with the generated css. theme will be callback argument passed by the said tool to your function. It won't matter in that case whether it's a client or a server component as far as the sx prop is concerned.

See the POC code where Home is a server component.

[JanStevens]

Nice! I wonder how nested themes would be supported 🤔.

Our use case: We heavily use nested themes where our main theme overwrites almost every component. For specific pages we have a unique look and feel where we use nested themes that partially update some components (ex font family for all h1-h4 or fully rounded buttons).

Another use case: we have a fully dark based theme except for our ecommerce pages they are completely light theme based (again with a nested light theme), but the header and footer stay in the dark theme for example 😅.

Looking forward! Regards

[astahmer]

hey, this looks amazing !

regarding Panda, I wanted to add a little more infos:

The major drawback, however, is that this is a PostCSS plugin, which means that it does not modify the source code in place, so you still end up with a not-so-small runtime (generated using panda codegen) depending on the number of features you are using.

I can understand that. You could evaluate those css calls etc at build-time I guess tho, as it was done by the Qwik people here

Although we can’t directly use PandaCSS, we did find that it uses some cool libraries, such as ts-morph and ts-evaluate to parse and evaluate the CSS in its extractor package.

you could use the extractor on its own if that helps, it has no panda-specific dependencies !

[OlegLustenko]

This could be a brave idea, but what do you think about completely dropping or making opt-in CSS-IN-JS in favor of libraries like TailwindCSS or UnoCSS for styling?

It could be an ambitious, but long-term win solution and definitely a win-win decision

No matter what you will do, you will have to implement an intermediate layer.

[damassi]

One question: Is CSS-in-JS support incoming for RSC on the React side? There has been some discussion around this, though I can't find where.

[mwskwong]

One question: Is CSS-in-JS support incoming for RSC on the React side? There has been some discussion around this, though I can't find where.

The reason why runtime CSS-in-JS (not just CSS in JS in general to be exact) has so many problems in the new architecture of React is because as its name suggests, it needs JS in runtime to function, while RSC does the exact opposite.

For this RFC, we are talking about zero runtime CSS-in-JS, so ideally, everything will be converted into plain CSS during built-time and won't have the issue we are facing. Although one thing to consider is whether it can maintain a certain degree of dynamic since we no longer have access to resources like theme during runtime.

[NicestRudeGuy]

Why not use CSS Modules for theming ? I believe this would be simpler and easier to do. Though the dynamic styling part needs to be figured out. Maybe use good old styles object with CSSProperties from react for type safety.

We recently diteched our old DS which used context and CSS-IN-JS for theming and the new CSS Variables are way easier to do with Design tokens as well. Performant and can easily style components if required.
Can also do Module Scss if you would like.

We took alot of inspiration from MUI the way its built and the components API as well. Thanks for building this amazing Library.