The new wave of React state management

Post by sdrinf » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 12:48 AM UTC

jfvinueza wrote: post #115

I've been using Pullstate for medium-sized apps for a couple years and it's fantastic: uses Immer under the hood (so it's all immutable even if it look as it wasn't), it's API and mental model are vulgarly simple, and my impression is that it's quite performant. I also like that the store is disentangled from the component tree, which allows for plenty of flexibility. Totally recommended! https://lostpebble.github.io…

Post by wildrhythms » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 12:56 AM UTC

rglover wrote: post #77

jeroenhd wrote: post #7

I've used Redux but I've never heard of any of these alternatives. I have no doubt they're popular, but what is it about frontend that makes everyone reinvent the wheel every five years? Everything from the tooling to the tiny details somehow expires and gets recreated in a similar-but-not-similar-enough way that keeps the ecosystem in a constant state of flux. Is it the lack of platform API support? Is it the commun…

A few different problems... "Necessity is the mother of invention" comes to play here. The reality is that the community hypes certain tools, but in practice, they tend to have gotchas buried far beyond the surface level demos and documentation. The problem with that is that you only figure that out after committing to those tools and using them. This leads to tool abandonment, or in some cases, developers taking a s…

Post by dham » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:05 AM UTC

bcherny wrote: post #22

petilon wrote: post #4

The "state management problem" appears to be an invention of React. This didn't use to be a problem with MVC. The state lives on the server. When state changes it should be persisted on the server immediately (in case the user unexpectedly closes the browser). On the client all you need is a cache. With MVC, each page is more or less independent. Each page gets the data it needs from the server (through a client-side…

Your causation is reversed. People demanded more interactive web apps, which led to more stateful UI, which led to React. In the case of Facebook, the motivating app was Ads Manager — an enormous, highly interactive single page app for advertisers. You couldn’t build something like it with HTML + server endpoints; in the pre-web days, apps with this kind of complexity would be desktop apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets…

Post by BigJono » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

ksbrooksjr wrote: post #114

civilized wrote: post #88

Curious layman here (no web dev experience). I thought the main selling point of reactive programming was that it abstracted away the need to manage state. What problems, then, does a state management library solve in a reactive framework?

Most state management libraries help you deal with the problem of sharing state between multiple components. In modern React, most components are just functions, so this boils down to passing state through deep call stacks. If you have a component A, which renders component B, which in turn renders component C, without a state management library you'd have to pass state from A to B to C (this is often called prop dri…

Post by BigJono » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:36 AM UTC

melony wrote: post #9

Most of these new client side state management libraries are incompatible with any form of SSR. If you see the documentation for Jotai/Zustand/Valtio, the solution is to avoid using with Next.js at all, or fall back to hacks using context+provider at which point the state manager becomes effectively redundant.