Ask HN: How do you manage state in your React application?

Yes

We use Redux at work for larger projects, React setState/Context for smaller ones, and I'm personally a huge fan of mobx-state-tree which I think is the best solution, and can be plugged into Redux if needed.

I think Redux should not be used for everything (there are libraries like Redux-Form which I think are an anti-pattern as ephemeral state like that should never go through the root reducer on every key change)

Pass the things returned from useReducer() hook (state object + dispatch function) down via context. Then useContext() in child components.

In the past I used Redux extensively - and I have only good things to say about Redux. I recently started using React Context and found I was much more productive, to the extent that I went back and ripped out Redux code. The new hooks thing with useContext makes using context even easier.

Learning Redux, especially the "single source of truth" thing was very helpful, but my code is now simpler, easier to understand and faster to write.

I would recommend checking out React context and hooks. I would also recommend watching the Redux videos by Dan Abramov, even if you don't use Redux.

Been using MobX for about three years and I think it is wonderful. Incredibly easy to use (mark your variable as observable, modify it like you would any normal variable, and any components which use those variables in their rendering and are marked as observers automatically update), very performant out of the box (only components affected by a change re-render so no shouldComponentUpdate needed) and some excellent features like computed variables for derived values which automatically update. I really urge everyone to try it out. There is the odd time when the abstraction us a bit leaky (e.g. working with arrays is a bit different to plain JS) but with proxies in MobX 5 this is much improved.

I started out with Redux and I do think it’s worth learning - not just because it’s so widespread, but the concepts behind it are worth knowing and have influenced the way I design some stuff, but I found it really verbose and slow to work with compared to MobX (and more error prone) - there probably are libraries that help with this.

React Hooks look interesting for more simple use cases but I expect I’ll stick with MobX for the foreseeable future.