React Server Components: A Philosophical Dive into Tags vs. Function Calls

This article explores the fundamental differences between tags and function calls, starting from the context of React Server Components. The author uses the analogy of architectural blueprints and cooking recipes to illustrate the declarative nature of tags versus the imperative nature of function calls. The discussion delves into remote procedure calls and asynchronous programming, culminating in a theoretical framework for splitting computations across multiple machines. Tags represent potential function calls spanning time and space, and by differentiating between Components and Primitives, the author addresses how different functions depend on computation order. This leads to an efficient method for program segmentation.