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Comment by methehack | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to decide between Elm and React/Reflux for the js part of a side project. I'm concerned about learning curve and awkwardness of adoption if the project ever turns into something someone else is coding on. I know they are very different technologies, but I think others must be choosing between them. Any thoughts from those who have tried both?

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I personally like React + Immutable.js (for the store) + Redux (https://github.com/rackt/redux) which is more similar to Om and apparently Elm. It's actually the first Fluxlike implementation I willingly use.

I'm using the same stack (minus immutable.js, but I'm thinking on it), combined with redux-simple-router. Apart from the usual problems associated with Javascript, it works pretty well, and I feel it's easy to understand what is going on.

On the other hand, there are some pitfalls. Since you may need to trigger actions based on some transient state (eg, fetching data from the server), you occasionally need to set flags in your store ("my state is dirty"). Forgetting to clean up a flag will lead to tears.

Same here, just switched to TypeScript today and it's quite nice. Not as nice than Elm in terms of tooling (those errors are much more helpful than the TypeScript one and js of course). I guess it depends whether you want the React community or don't mind a smaller one and a functional language.

Elm is a much, much smaller community than React. You won’t find as many libraries and ready-made components in Elm as you would in React. On the other hand, when there is an Elm library for something, it’s often of very high quality.

The learning curve is not terribly steep, compared to Haskell. There are a lot of good resources, and many friendly people on the mailing list to help you if you decide to learn Elm!

Haven't tried Reflux but I would recommend trying Redux before it. It is heavily inspired by Elm and has been very pleasant to work with. Reflux also bypasses the 'unidirectional data flow' part of Flux, which gives you added convenience for some things at the cost of more complexity.

I gave a talk going through this very conundrum. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0DXNB94NE

I used to be a Reflux fan myself, but baobab (Om architecture) has scaled much better for us, in terms of code as well as devs who are new to React/Flux.

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