It's a super awesome feeling to have open sourced this after working on it for months, and I think we've done some interesting things. So I want to share our ideas and opinions. I'm hoping to publish more about them in the coming weeks.
We have a lot of complexity in our view/component layer where we trying to bring simple workflows to very complicated technical features. Backbone (even with Marionette) doesn't have a strong view composition story, essentially avoiding setting up any patterns.
React's composition pattern is so strong that its hard not to abstract things. The complexity is still there but its easy to follow and extremely simple to test (especially with redux).
There are more reasons, but I have to go now. Hopefully that suffices
There were two primary drivers the led me to adopt Redux.
1) When working with multiple services to build a single view, Backbone models are the wrong abstraction. Redux allows you to work with arbitrary data structures without the need to deal with hooking up events between nested models/collections. It also prevents overfetching or having to resort to nested models when a single endpoint serves multiple views.
2) Managing complex asynchronous flows becomes easier when there's a single source of truth.
The backends for frontends pattern that Netflix and Thoughtworks have written about is another approach to dealing with the multiple services issue, but in reality, it's not an option for every project.
I haven't tested the performance heavily but I'm not really concerned about it.
<Table striped>
<TableBody>
<TableRow>
<TableCell>One</TableCell>
<TableCell>Two</TableCell>
</TableRow>
<TableRow>
<TableCell>Three</TableCell>
<TableCell>Four</TableCell>
</TableRow>
</TableBody>
</Table> <Input />
<input class="form-control" />
However, Elm is still making breaking changes on the language level [1]. To bet on a language like that right now is tough for a larger company.
Also, we're not dropping everything and rewriting it all from the ground up. I'm not sure that Elm has a good story for incremental migrations yet, where React has an excellent one.