observable VS starfx

> especially since Observables have been widely available and actively worked on for a long time, without seeing wide adoption

Take a look at "Userland libraries" section [0] of the proposal (almost certainly written by Ben). He argues that observables get reinvented in the userland in various libraries over and over again. It is a primitive, like a Promise, only better.

[0] - https://github.com/WICG/observable?tab=readme-ov-file#userla...

Perhaps this falls into the repetitive boilerplate category you referred to, but if you want framework-agnostic domain objects that still work well with Svelte, create your own using the observer pattern.

Create an object with a subscribe method and whatever other methods make sense for updating its state. Svelte will treat it like one of its stores, and it will work with the $ syntax. It can be used with React via its `useSyncExternalStore` hook. It can be used with SolidJS via its `from` utility.

If you don't want to handle the set-up boilerplate, you could use another library like Effector or RxJS, but of course, that means another dependency. There is a gradual move to make something like this a part of the platform[1], but who knows when or if it will land.

[1] https://github.com/domfarolino/observable

Ah! A real criticism of FE development, I agree with your problem statement.

When you jump into the world of single-page applications, things get complex pretty quickly, because the use case for needing an SPA pushes the web app into a full desktop application.

Ultimately, for a highly interactive and dynamic "desktop-class" user experience, there is added complexity. I think that's why so much movement within the FE world has moved away from "SPA for everything" and into these mixed dynamic apps. Islands, React Server Components, NextJS, they all help create a middleground between a document-based website with no dynamic elements with a full blown desktop app experience. They all have real tradeoffs, in particular adding an entirely new backend service to serve the front end.

For many projects, react + react-query is probably enough.

Having said that, my argument from https://bower.sh/dogma-of-restful-api still stands: when you build an API that is RESTful (1:1 mapping between endpoint and entity) you are unknowingly pushing the complexity of data synchronization to the FE, which requires a well thought out ETL pipeline.

This probably doesn't help my case but I've been building a simplified middle-layer for react to bridge the gap between react-query and full blown SPA: https://starfx.bower.sh

`redux-saga` maintainer here.

I've been using `effection` to build a replacement for `redux-saga` over at https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

Effection has demonstrated to me how truly powerful delimited continuations are and why structured concurrency is an incredible asset for anything that requires async flow control -- basically everything in TS/JS.

I know sometimes it's hard to imagine why someone would need structured concurrency or care about delimited continuations for a front-end application, but this is a game changer in terms of expressing async flow control.

Some things to note about Effection:

- API surface area is small https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/issues/851

- It tries to stay as close to JS constructs as possible so it will feel very familiar

- Resource cleanup is automatic (when a function passes out of scope all descendent tasks are shut down automatically)

- End-user doesn't need to think about delimited continuations

The only leap users need to "deal with" coming from async/await is the syntax.

    import { main, call } from "effection";

- https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

- https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/tree/v3

- https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

The last one intends to replace redux-saga using DCs.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently talking about DCs in typescript: https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=XI0JNMKMoO2VHMvM

A couple of us have been experimenting with deliminited continuations and I think it’s gonna take off soon:

https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=kgKKjpCnehJ9bpIG

https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

I feel the same way which is why I decided to help maintain the project. Async flow control is very tricky even in js–land. Having watchers live inside of a while-loop is a powerful construct that lends itself to interest flow control patterns.

I'm also in the process of rebuilding redux-saga but without the redux part: https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

It's still in alpha stage, but it is very reminiscent of redux-saga.