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Atom-based state management and Valtio

· 3 min read
Gracefullight
Gracefullight
Owner

Overview​

  • At one point, redux-saga seemed like a cool way to solve redux's tired state management, and then a combination of atomic states seemed like the way to go.
  • That's why I've mostly used recoil, but if you're using query or swr, you don't need such a complicated feature to manage local UI state.
  • recoil seems to be an almost abandoned project with only bug fixes in the meta. discussion#2171
  • Anyway, local UI state just needs to have a pub/sub pattern.
  • The winner of the 2023 state management library seems to be zustand.
    • If you're building an event/messaging based system, it makes sense to use that library with the Flux pattern.
    • If you're building an editor with action-based behavior for all front-end features, or if you're integrating with a chat system that receives function call requests, that's one thing.
  • But for a typical use case, Flux is overkill, except for cascading forms, badges, modals, etc.
  • If I were developing alone, I would want to separate the backend from the frontend, separate the Local, Dev, Stage, and Prod stages, and have a DB, scheduler, queue, API, and SSR stack.

atom​

  • Read first; The new wave of React state management을 보자.
  • Atomic, pub/sub, and derived are possible.
  • Using derived state is also rarely necessary unless you need a new state per ID. For data, query already does the job.
  • Atomic design and atomic state management became a necessity.
  • With many developers working asynchronously, it was important to keep track of which files were atoms and what they were for.
  • We have a *.atom.ts file superfix and a *State variable name superfix.

valtio​

  • Both jotai/atom and Recoil/atom manage atom-based state and propagate state.
  • valtio/proxy implements the same functionality using Proxy and Reflect.
  • Memory management is not the worst, as you can see from the Results for js web frameworks benchmark.
  • zustand, jotai, and valtio are all open source, covered by the pmndrs community, with the same person as a contributor and maintainer.
  • It just works, as his comments in valito/discussion#128 show.
  • valito/issues#141 Having spent a year on Redux and Redux-saga, and two years on Mobx POC and Recoil, this comment really resonated with me.
  • For the time being, I'm going to create several projects and try to use this state management library in all of them.