remove the "stack", use HOCs instead

@rockymeza had the very interesting idea, in our Slack, of writing plugins as React components. Potentially even using HOCs to re-implement all of the logic that is currently handled by the custom plugin system.

I think this is really interesting, and has the potential to simplify some things in core, and kinda seems obvious now that I think about it, which good ideas often do.

Haven’t fully fleshed this out yet, but…

• We could get rid of the Stack concept, since HOCs would imply the ordering, and they can easily override or passthrough to the Editor as they please. This would also eliminate the potential hidden performance impact to re-creating the stack on every render, since it would be obvious that re-creating the Component on every render would have negative performance impacts.
• We could remove the render and renderPortal properties of plugins, since they would be supported automatically with HOCs.
• We might be able to remove storing state in this.state.state, and instead just use this.props.state, simplifying some logic.

If you have thoughts, please add! Especially if there are holes that aren’t possible with HOCs that we’d need to figure out.

[rockymeza]

I have managed to get some time from work to work on this the next two weeks. I’m going to put a base together and port some of our internal plugins to it. I’m going to try to come with something as ergonomic as possible first and then think about how to port the legacy plugins to it. I will post back here when I have something to look at.

[ms88privat]

@danburzo About performance of multiple HOC’s. There are attempts to combine multiple HOC’s into one HOC automatically by various “recompose” libraries