uhtml VS immutable-js

I have to say that I am an extremist minimalist, so I use a nano-framework I developed for the frontend, with uhtml (https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml) and some JavaScript libraries to help.

One of the main decisions I had to make early on was template handling, there are many approaches out there and of course, with React being the king, I first tried implementing a VirtualDOM complete with JSX support and whatnot... well that didn't really worked for what I was trying to achieve, so I moved into Tagged Template Literals (through µhtml) and tried to stick to standards as much as possible by building on top of the Custom Elements API.

FAST rendering thanks to µhtml

Challenge: With declarative rendering, oftentimes entire DOM trees are re-painted because of simple prop or state changes that could have been handled faster by imperative DOM manipulation. I wanted a framework that, like Lit, only updated content or attributes that had changed instead of re-painting entire DOM elements and trees. Solution: I chose µhtml for the default templating system because it accomplishes this goal and other advanced templating features in a tiny bundle size. To make rendering even faster and smoother, I throttled uhtml's rendering using requestAnimationFrame.

> There are lighter-weight shadow dom frameworks out there (than Vue/React/Angular) so why would you want to write one yourself?

You can even avoid a shadow DOM entirely:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml

My next goal would be to discard snabbdom (and virtualdom) and use custom elements. For that I'm evaluating a library like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml and all it's ecosystem of utility

Yep ditched React since 2015, it's still the same mess today. They all not trying to encourage interoperability, and comes with their own build .. seriously? Frontend should be just libs! Use https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml or lit-html where things should be highly dynamic.

If it's for getting into job market, go for React. If it's for learning declarative ui, build cool stuff real quick without tooling, go with lit-html or bravely go with https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml (it's more simple than anything else, yet powerful)

A tiny dom lib like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml is more than enough for very complicated UI, with understanding how events work, will be able to implement very thin state management on top. With game programming styled manual render() call here and there as needed, pretty neat.

immutable for JavaScript.

Check out Object.freeze. There's also Immutable.js for working with immutable data.

Use immutability to manage state updates When updating state in your React application, it's important to ensure that you are not mutating the original state object. Instead, you should create a new copy of the state object with the updated values. Immutability makes it easier to manage state updates and ensures that the updates are performed in a predictable and safe manner. Libraries like Immutable.js provide a set of functions that simplify working with immutable data in React applications.

We're wanting to get rid of immutable so I'm trying to replicate what it is about the Record functionality and types that allow this dynamic property access to work. After pulling my hair out looking through the [email protected] type definitions and the actual code, to me it looks like the types are just kind of lying about what's going on ... and it's just working. Does anyone have any ideas how I can replicate this dynamic property access with strong typings?

The Immutable.js README has a much more complete description of immutability and why you might want to use the library. Also worth mentioning that Immer is an alternative which is a bit easier to get started with.

Examples: immutable-js Immer

I can't speak to C# and Java, but the suggestion in this post: ImmutableJS already uses Persistent data structures. (It's the second sentence of their introduction)

Avoiding mutation is just never modifiyng an object, ever. There are tons of implementations of this pattern, notably immutable.js (https://immutable-js.com/), Redux is also an example of this philosophy.

JavaScript is most programers' first introduction to map, filter, and reduce. Easy lambdas made those higher-order functions a staple of a lot of JS code.

Meanwhile, immutable.js[0] is at 10 million downloads per week and rising.

I would add that it's not just the ease of use of lambdas, but the fact that in JavaScript functions really are first class citizens. Most of the other widely used languages that people start on have lambda functions added in as a bit of a hack and only treat some functions as real values.

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/immutable