https://fe-tool.com/awesome-react-state-management
That's an article listing the top 18 state management libraries for React.
18?!?
React devs can't even agree on a common development model for state, but you think it's explicit and very easy to reason about?
Folks don't adopt utility libraries for things that were already easy to reason about on their own. I'm glad you've found peace with React's basic notion of state, but it's a far cry from optimal. And the "state ecosystem" of React is a dumpster fire. Layers upon layers of madness that acolytes peer through and proclaim insight.
> These rerenders can only happen down from where in the tree the state change happens.
Yes, after it has DIFFED the whole tree to see where the changes occurred in the first place. Madness. Layers of utter madness.
Despite there being so many, only a handful (redux toolkit, jotai, zustand recoil, and mobx) see much real-world use and they are basically just 3 approaches (reducers, signals, and directed graphs) with varying levels of complexity and features.
> Yes, after it has DIFFED the whole tree to see where the changes occurred in the first place. Madness. Layers of utter madness.
Not true. It only needs to diff the leaves of the part that changed and some of those sub-trees can be skipped too if they are functionally pure (or uses shouldComponentUpdate). This is how they reduce complexity down from O(n^3) to something generally closer to O(n)
Can you explain how all 3 state mechanisms you mentioned, and how they are different ?
I think the more glaring criticism is the lack of any unified component library. The amount of different Button implementations alone is astounding
The real kick to the shins is that React Server Components did a number on most component libraries, too. I've been forced to go to Tailwind (and DaisyUI, which is pretty nice) just so my stuff doesn't require 'use client' all over the place. The end result will be way better, it already is when you actually can get there, but right now it's annoying and awkward.
To be fair, context is not a state management tool [0], an article by acemarke, the Redux maintainer. It does work as a dependency injection tool and for many people, that's enough, but it's not a true state management tool.
[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...
> 18?!?
I mean, the top library has more weekly NPM downloads than every other library in the list combined.
> Yes, after it has DIFFED the whole tree to see where the changes occurred in the first place. Madness. Layers of utter madness.
That is not how rendering works in React.
Unfortunately, many React apps use Relay (another Meta product) and it opens up a world of “magic” that is sometimes a real pain to reason about.
https://github.com/coralproject/talk
I agree that Relay CAN be simple, but it isn't for what we do. Have a look at this ReplyListContainer and its nested Relay logic. I didn't originally write this, but I can see what they were trying to do and how Relay made it difficult for them. Your thoughts are welcome, I won't judge you for being critical of our code and welcome any other Relay dev's opinions.
https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/develop/client/src...
Hooks are also very interesting, they're basically functions that run at specific times, or that is to say, they're `f(...parameters, state)`. They hold state inside the function, sort of like a closure.
