aberdeen VS Immer

We've had great results from our custom built non-pure reactive system (which predates React by a couple of years).

The idea is to have an Observable object that can store arbitrary trees of data (each itself an Observable). UI drawing is generally split into a function call for each DOM element that has children. These functions are executed such that they track the use of observables and will be rerun when they change.

I've more recently, after having suffered React and friends, started creating an Open Source implementation of the pattern we used. Currently, it's mostly still lacking in documentation and marketing, and that's unlikely to change if I'm honest. But this should give you an impression if you're interested:

https://github.com/vanviegen/aberdeen/blob/master/examples/t...

Curious to know your thoughts about this being an effective non-pure reactive system.

Yes, that's possible and works really well.

I've written this library [1] as a clean reimplementation of a more complex beast we created for a (now dead) startup. Although the reimplementation has only seen very light use, we've used the concept extensively, and it's a joy to use. Take a look at the examples [2].

[1] https://github.com/vanviegen/aberdeen

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It looks like it’s mutating, but both the reducers and update() uses immer* under the hood, so we still respect immutability under the hood.

Cami supports redux devtools so you can use that for time-travel debugging too!

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* https://github.com/immerjs/immer

I heard that immutability libraries like immer.js [0] help with this. Anyone go this way and had good success? Is this 'the way'?

[0]: https://immerjs.github.io/immer/

So, that's what we built, and we built it in the most obvious way — using JavaScript Proxy objects to track mutations and reflect those changes across Appsmith’s framework. Initially things looked good — it worked, aside from a few hacks to make some data types work with map and set, and we were following the example of other projects that had similar requirements. If it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for us, right?

But is immer really the ultimate answer? The performance problem of immer is more prominent in large arrays and deep-level object scenarios. See this issue description, many authors in the community began to try to make breakthroughs, and noticed that structura and mutative, I found that it is indeed many times faster than immer as they said, but it still fails to solve the problem of both fast speed and good development experience. I will analyze the two issues in detail below.

I like immer for this kind of thing: https://github.com/immerjs/immer

It gives you immutable updates without getting bogged down in FP abstractions.

I've always been a huge fan of immer for these case. For your code, it would simply turn into setGridData((prev) => produce(prev, draft => applyChanges(changes, draft)) but I recommend you go over their documentation to fully understand how it works

If you're trying to make things actually immutable, Object.freeze and deep copies can clutter things up pretty good, have you considered using something like immer? (https://immerjs.github.io/immer/)

If you want to set up from Context, Zustand is your best bet. It offers an extremely simple API that lets you create a store with values and functions. Then, you can access that store from anywhere in your application to read and write values. Reactivity included! If you want to store nested object data in your store, consider using Immer alongside Zustand to easily change nested state.