redux-templates VS redux-xstate-poc

Yeah, _please_ don't use `typesafe-actions` :)

It may have had some value before RTK came out, but a lot of the opinions and approaches shown in its docs lead you to write _wayyyy_ too much code. For example, we specifically recommend _against_ writing TS unions for action object types [0].

RTK completely obsoletes `typesafe-actions`, and the TS usage patterns that we teach today should result in a pretty minimal set of types that you need to write in your own code.

For a small example see the RTK+TS template for Create-React-App [1]. If you want to see what a real app codebase can look like, the client app for my day job at Replay.io is OSS [2]. It's admittedly a somewhat messy codebase due to its long evolution and legacy (started as the FF DevTools codebase, copy-pasted, and we've been slowly migrating to RTK+TS and modernizing it), but files like [3] show how I would write a real slice reducer with RTK+TS.

[0] https://redux.js.org/usage/usage-with-typescript#avoid-actio...

[1] https://github.com/reduxjs/cra-template-redux-typescript

[2] https://github.com/replayio/devtools

[3] https://github.com/replayio/devtools/blob/454804188d33900a26...

The recommended way to initialize a new app with React and Redux is by using the official Redux+JS template or Redux+TS template.

I learned the basics of react initially, and then when I started using typescript + react, I did so using the create-react-app typescript redux template. I found that having a template to build from was extremely helpful. I'm sure there are other good templates out there if you didn't want to worry about redux (I think it's good, but it's got it's own mental overhead), but being able to refer to the template implementation was extremely helpful, since the typings of some react things can be highly weird.

Please see the official Redux+TS template for CRA, which shows the correct "modern Redux" patterns in action, as well as the "Modern Redux with RTK" tutorial page and our recommended TS usage patterns.

btw, note that we have an official Redux+TS template for CRA that comes with RTK and React-Redux already configured.

Now the first two questions have been answered. Moving on to the next one, state management. I decided to use redux. Came across this amazing toolkit and this beautiful and friendly template template from the official reduxjs repository.

Very doable, but not the most ideal syntax, since `createSlice` is focused on "here's an action / thing that happened, here's the reducer that handles that".

On the flip side, you can also use XState state machines as Redux reducers. A state machine is, after all, a function that takes a current state value + some event, and returns a new state.... exactly the same as a reducer function!

David and I have been saying for a while that we'd like to have a more official integration between XState and Redux. A while back, Matt Pocock put together an proof of concept for what a `createXStateSlice` might look like [1]. I actually sat down with David a couple weeks ago and we did some further design discussions about the possibility of using the `@xstate/fsm` package (a smaller version of XState's logic) as a starting point, and generating RTK actions based on that. No code yet, but it seems feasible.

[0] https://dev.to/davidkpiano/redux-is-half-of-a-pattern-1-2-1h...

[1] https://github.com/mattpocock/redux-xstate-poc

Fun fact: one of the XState devs did a proof-of-concept showing how to use XState state machines as Redux reducers and integrate the side effects handling as a middleware:

https://github.com/mattpocock/redux-xstate-poc

We'd like to work together to turn that into a more official integration sometime soon.

One of the XState devs recently posted https://github.com/mattpocock/redux-xstate-poc , an example of how you can integrate XState into a Redux app for use as a Redux slice reducer + side effects middleware