A simple hook to abstract away storing the result of an expensive operation in a ref. It takes a function as an argument which will be executed on the first render and the result will be stored in a ref. On subsequent renders, the current property of the ref will be returned without re-running the function.
Take this example from the React docs:
const playerRef = useRef(null);
if (playerRef.current === null) {
playerRef.current = new VideoPlayer();
}Instead you can just write:
const player = useInit(() => new VideoPlayer());You then use the player by just calling player instead of player.current.
It does not take a dependency array and will never re-run the function even if something changes, so you could also think of it as:
const foo = useMemo(() => someExpensiveOperation(), []);