As someone who created those horrifying RxJS monstrosities, I agree with most of this, which is why I caveated my concerns. Tanstack Query simplified a lot of these issues—separating server state and caching from client side state was a huge boost. I’m mostly coming from the perspective of someone who just inherited a Jotai code base with 200+ atoms and trying to wrap my head around it. Any library poorly used can lead to a mess though, so not going to claim it’s a problem inherent to all atom based approaches.
Most UIs I've written in my career benefit from being modeled as FSMs. While I see the value proposition of the atom-based approaches, especially for basic applications, I can't help but become a bit hesitant about their scalability long-term on large teams. Part of the reason the very dogmatic Redux approach of a event dispatching + single store of truth caught on so quickly was because a lot of us had felt the pain of two-way data binding / global state with event listeners in Angular 1. I distinctly remember the horror of debugging digest loops (scope.$$phase memories) and being completely lost in the unstructured data flow. What made for a great demo became a nightmare at scale.
There's nothing stopping people from using these atom-based libraries to build more robust abstractions, but from my professional experience I tend to just see global getters and setters with useEffects / lifecycle method of your frameworks choice as a side effect sync.
Maybe my instincts are off here though and I am overly cautious. I love XState but the learning curve is rather massive and getting buy in from other team members is hard when the DX of the atom approach is so nice.
I feel like state "management" and reactivity performance are talked about a lot, when ultimately state orchestration is where I see things fall over the most.
We aren’t good at creating software systems from reliable and knowable components. A bit skeptical that the future of software is making a Rube Goldberg machine of black box inter-LLM communication.
That's right, Effect lifts all types to a lazily-evaluated common type and provides combinators to work with that type, similar to RxJS with Observables and its operators.
Retrying[0], observability[1], and error handling[2] are first-class concerns and have built-in combinators to make dealing with those problems quite ergonomic. Having these features is a non-starter for any serious application, but unfortunately, the story around them in the TypeScript ecosystem is not great—at least as far as coherence goes. You often end up creating abstractions on top of unrelated libraries and trying to smash them together.
I'm a big fan of ReasonML / OCaml, and I think the future of TypeScript will involve imitating many of its code patterns.
I think going all-in on Effect in its current state is not something I'd do. However there's a subset of its functionality that I'm currently replicating with a bunch of different libraries: ts-pattern, zod, some lightweight result / option wrapper like ts-belt, etc. Pretty much trying to pretend I'm writing ML / OCaml. Having those all in one package is quite convenient. Add in TypeScript's the much needed story around retry / observability / error handling—I see why people lean into it.
Having experience with ZIO / FP in Scala, I'm a bit biased in seeing the value of Effect systems as a whole, but taking on the burden of explaining that mental model to team members and future maintainers is a big cost for most teams.
The fragmentation around runtime validation libraries is pretty crazy. The fact that half these comments mention some alternative library that mimics almost the exact API of Zod illustrates that.
It is filling a necessary shortcoming in the gradual typing of TypeScript, and using validator schema types to power other APIs generic inference is powerful. I am optimistic about an obvious leader emerging, or at least a better story about swapping between them more easily, but a bit annoying when trying to pick one to settle on for work that I have confidence in. That being said, Zod seems like the community favorite at the moment.
I do consulting for a few restaurants, and despite my experience building full-stack web applications, I find myself reaching for Excel for most of my deliverables. These are "applications" that "non-technical" restaurant operators need to be comfortable in. Having a sheet where they paste in some data and get their needed output has required the least amount of continued maintenance and training. They can drag the file around in Dropbox / Google Drive and that works for them.
I still try to "engineer" to the best of my ability—separating raw input from derived data from configuration, data normalization, etc. With Lambda functions in Excel now, I kinda just pretend I'm writing Lisp in an FRP editor / runtime environment. The ETL tools with PowerQuery are quite good for the scale that these restaurants operate at.
Hard for me to turn off my brain in my full-time job when I am tasked with poorly recreating a feature that Excel nailed years ago.
Do you have any favorite resources (can be books, courses, blog posts) that teach with this approach from? I have been diving more into 3D and the shortcomings in my mathematical background are starting to show.
I have not used it in production yet, but it's been great for one-off scripts and side projects. Setting up a TypeScript Node environment with ts-node, ts-jest, ESM support, top level await, etc. is more annoying than it should be. More recent Node releases have alleviated some of this pain, but not as trivial as running bun init.
I like the idea, especially the TS-like syntax around enums and union types. I've always preferred the SDL for GraphQL vs writing OpenAPI for similar reasons. Most APIs I've run into in my career would benefit from modeling their API responses as ADTs versus the usual approach of overloading 4 different union members into a giant spare object.
I echo the sentiment others have brought up, which is the trade-offs of a code-driven schema vs schema-driven code.
At work we use Pydantic and FastAPI to generate the OpenAPI contract, but there's some cruft and care needed around exposing those underlying Pydantic models through the API documentation. It's been easy to create schemas that have compatibility problems when run through other code generators. I know there are projects such as connexction[1] which attempt to inverse this, but I don't have much experience with it. In the GraphQL space it seems that code-first approaches are becoming more favored, though there's a different level of complexity needed to create a "typesafe" GraphQL server (eg. model mismatches between root query resolvers and field resolvers).
ts-pattern has been a decent band-aid for the lack of native pattern matching, but obviously has downsides that could be avoided if it was built into the language.
Thanks for the link! Hadn't seen that release, looks promising. I think this could definitely work for some of our newer apps that haven't fully bought into GraphQL yet. Not sure if the loader / action prop callbacks will be sufficient when you start getting into more complicated GraphQL use cases around caching. Haven't played with it though, so might be wrong! Good to see that these will already be in place for the community to leverage.
Thanks for the links! Will certainly check them out, might even send me down memory lane a bit when I was first reading about these. Would love a full-fledged recap at some point—it's really interesting getting insight into the the internal mechanics of the problems my UI framework solves for me in my day-to-day. I always come away feeling more informed when you write something, but you've earned a long break after this release, so no pressure!
I hear you on the data fetching and always appreciate your teams' cautious approach. It gives me a lot of confidence in the APIs you all end up landing on, and I appreciate the focus on backwards compatibility and incremental upgrading as opposed to shipping out the first iteration of a cool idea that comes to mind. I know just enough about React to probably shoot myself in the foot with this type of stuff, but add in the idea of concurrency and all that likely falls over.
I think the story here with Relay and GraphQL is really awesome. I hope the Relay team has an article in the future showing off some of the possibilities—I think it makes a really strong argument for itself in conjunction with these features, even taking into account the restrictions you mention. Showing how some of these features flesh out in a more complete framework would be helpful in framing them in a vacuum. Or maybe I'll stop complaining and explore and write something myself!
Congratulations to the React team on the release! I've kept up somewhat with the development of these features since Dan first introduced some of the ideas at JSConf 3 years ago. It's interesting to see how the APIs have changed over time—I'm sure as a result of some tough lessons learned at Facebook.
As someone who has worked on large React projects worked on by multiple teams, I can see a lot of the value proposition being delivered in this release. I can already think of many places where I'll want to slot in the transition API.
I'm curious if the SuspenseList API is making the cut here or if it's still on the roadmap? I played with it a while back and thought it was very cool, albeit slightly niche perhaps.
The only part that's a bit of a bummer is the recommendation on using suspense for data fetching. I'm already itching to get rid of lots of if (loading) {} code that plagues many of our components and makes orchestration and re-use of them a bit more painful than we'd like. I see lots of power in the idea of suspense as a way to orchestrate various generic async operations, but it feels like they don't want us to build solutions on this abstraction unless we buy into some opinionated framework. I can't really tell my team "let's use remix now lol".
All that being said this is a tremendous step forward and I'm looking forward to seeing what problems the React team tackles next.
I use coc-nvim [0] for my development environment and love it. The VS Code plugin is a great start to get used to vim movement, but eventually you'll run into some limitations that end up being slightly annoying (albeit this was a few years back and those might not exist anymore!).
Most of my development is in TypeScript, which has a pretty good language server, so I don't feel like I'm really missing out on any of the "IDE" features that I get in VSCode. I am not a "pure vim" zealot, so I have a decent amount of plugins to bring my environment closer to an "IDE" than "just vim" (eg. NerdTree, fugitive, surround, sneak).
I haven't really touched my dotfiles in a year or two outside a few custom keybinds for new workflows I find myself repeating.
Getting good at whatever editor you choose to use for your daily development is a good investment. If you're going to choose one, vim is probably a decent choice for how long it's stayed around.
I miss reading the 100 page threads on What.CD about which of the 40 different rips of the White Album was best. Alternatives have popped up, but it saddens me that we lost all of that collective comment history.
I like the idea that the 200 line event dispatching state atom is more over-engineered than a framework that works off wrapped "observable" objects and uses ES6 proxy magic (MobX). Do proxies work in IE11? Didn't think you could just polyfill them.
I'd love to read something about your experience. We are currently using Apollo for one of our newer projects. We've written Redux apps in the past and understand the tradeoffs and limitations that come with that approach. We really love the component-level declarative data-fetching of Apollo client, but were pretty hesitant around the apollo-link-state stuff.
How are you integrating GQL in your Redux code? Do you still use Apollo Query/Mutation components? Do you use Redux in lieu of the Apollo cache? How do you deal with the slight mismatch of denormalized GQL data with a normalized Redux store?
I understand the problem that the Apollo cache is solving, and I feel like I do a lot of low value handwritten code when I use Redux instead--but the visibility and transparency of Redux still feels worth it?
I think leaning too heavily into apollo-link-state is going to draw the same boilerplate complaints of Redux. The amount of client code generation needed, plus all the schema details bleeding into your code (__typename)... doesn't feel like we are at the "solution" yet.
Just a few of my rambling thoughts. Kudos to the Apollo team for continuing to push the community forward. These are hard problems and we won't solve them without people trying to innovate.