Motivation I love Redux. But that doesn’t mean I like all parts of Redux ecosystem. Some people dislike Redux because of its boilerplate code. That’s sad. Boilerplate code is not from the Redux core, but from the ecosystem. Don’t get me wrong. Best practices are nice and I think the recent work of Redux Starter Kit is great. (Claps to Mark) I think I have my own understanding of how to use Redux with React. ... Read More

Introduction I have been developing several React hooks libraries for months. In this post, I will explain why and how I developed a React Redux binding library with React hooks. The library is implemented to be concurrent mode friendly. Let’s discuss why it’s important and what’s the technique behind it. React concurrent mode has not come yet, and all discussions are based on the current unstable behavior. Please note that when concurrent mode is released and best practice is researched, things may change. ... Read More

Introduction React useContext is very handy to avoid prop drilling. It can be used to define global state or shared state that multiple components in the tree can access. However, useContext is not specifically designed for global state and there’s a caveat. Any change to context value propagates all useContext to re-render components. This post shows some example code about the problem and the solution with state usage tracking. Problem Let’s assume a person object as a state. ... Read More

Introduction React hooks have changed the way to compose components. This post will show an example which is very hooks-oriented. We use two libraries: react-tracked and immer. While immer makes it easy to update state in an immutable way, react-tracked makes it easy to read state with tracking for optimization. Please check out the repo for more details. https://github.com/dai-shi/react-tracked The example we show is the one from Redux: Todo List ... Read More

Introduction There are many libraries for global state with React hooks. React Redux also provides hooks API, which is very clean. In general, I would avoid using global state. It would reduce the isolation of components. Multiple contexts should work fine for certain use cases. But, what if we really need a global state. Problem When a state is a non-trivial object, it’s not likely to use all properties of the object for one component to render. ... Read More

Introduction Since React hooks landed, there has been many libraries proposed for global state. Some of them are simple wrappers around context. Whereas, some of them are full featured state management systems. Technically, there are several implementations how to store state and notify changes. We don’t go in detail in this post, but just note two axes. whether context based or external store whether subscriptions based or context propagation In this post, we focus on API design of hooks at the consumer end. ... Read More

Introduction useReducer is a powerful hook. It’s known that useState is implemented with useReducer. In the React hooks docs, it’s noted like this: useReducer is usually preferable to useState when you have complex state logic that involves multiple sub-values or when the next state depends on the previous one. useReducer also lets you optimize performance for components that trigger deep updates because you can pass dispatch down instead of callbacks. ... Read More

Introduction React-Redux provides hooks API with nice abstraction. Especially, useSelector is probaly less misused than mapStateToProps. react-tracked is a library for global state without Redux. This library provides almost compatible hooks API to React-Redux. It’s developed with performance in mind, and it should be as performant as React-Redux, even though it utilizes only React context. See the GitHub repo for more information. https://github.com/dai-shi/react-tracked This post shows benchmark results to convince that it actually is performant in one scenario. ... Read More

Introduction There are many libraries to provide global state in React. React itself doesn’t provide such a feature, probably because separation of concerns is important and having global state naively is not idiomatic. However, in certain cases, having global state is good as long as it’s properly implemented. It’s likely that performance drops down compared to using non-global state (incl. multiple contexts). This post introduces a library for global state with performance. ... Read More

Introduction If you had already used Redux and loved it, you might not understand why people try using React context and hooks to replace Redux (a.k.a no Redux hype). For those who would think Redux DevTools Extension and middleware are nice to have, Redux and context + hooks are actually two options. Context + hooks is just fine to share state among components, however if apps get bigger, they are likely to require Redux or other similar solutions; otherwise they end up having many contexts that can’t be handled very easily. ... Read More