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Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

Redux is the only thing (sort of) from the React ecosystem that I'd save from a fire. But mine seems to be a minority opinion.

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Redux is largely responsible for turning me away from React sending me straight into Vue and Vuex.

If you ever have to go back to react, take a look at mobx

It is very uncomplicated

IMO mobx has better DX than redux, not sure why it's less popular. Probably because react community prefer FP over OOP?

Some graphQL clients can eliminate the need for these state management tools. Everything becomes just graphQL queries and mutations with very sophisticated caching. When you mutate some resource, other components that have queries that are affected by the mutation will re render with the new state.

I'm sorry to hear that :(

For what it's worth, we've changed Redux usage drastically in the last three years. "Modern Redux" with Redux Toolkit and React-Redux hooks is drastically simpler to learn and use than the older-style patterns, and we get feedback from users on a daily basis telling us how much they enjoy using RTK.

If you're curious to see what that looks like, I did a video discussing the changes and cooperatively live-coding an example app:

https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index#learn-modern-redux-live...

and the "Redux Essentials" tutorial in our docs shows how we want people to learn and use Redux today:

https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structu...

For what it's worth, I gave RTK a go after a rushed, failed attempt at using redux. Initially started as a POC for some internal tooling within the company. Due to its simplicity, it was a breeze to set up. Two years later, it's still great, and things like RTK Query[0] have made it even better, by removing the need to write custom data fetching logic, and adding other perks like caching.

Thank a lot for your hard work!

[0] https://redux-toolkit.js.org/rtk-query/overview

Thank you! Great to hear that it's working well for you.

Your second link briefly got my hopes up that I’d finally be able to learn a little about Redux today.

Nope, the tutorial tells me I better get good first in:

> React terminology: JSX, State, Function Components, Props, and Hooks

Does that imply you can’t use Redux without React at all? Or does it just use part of React’s concepts?

I’d totally love to learn to manage my application state better. Do I really have to pull React in with that? I use vanilla JS as much as I can because I want my apps to have a decent chance to still be working a decade from now.

> Does that imply you can’t use Redux without React at all?

Yikes, I hope not. One of my favorite things about Redux (last time I used it, maybe three years ago) was that it was easy, and even natural, to build an API client library around it that could be used almost anywhere that JS will run, because it wasn't tied to React.

No worries :) Non-React usage is still the minority use case, but it's one that we take seriously. Per my comment above, Redux and Redux Toolkit are still 100% UI-agnostic at their core. Even our new "RTK Query" data fetching API in RTK works with (or without!) any UI, which is why users have adapted it to run alongside NgRx, Vue, and Svelte.

Redux is 100% UI-agnostic. You can use it with any UI framework (React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, jQuery, web components, vanilla JS). This is also true with our official Redux Toolkit package, which is the standard way to write Redux logic today.

However, in practice, probably 90-95% of Redux users _do_ use it with React. So, yes, all of our tutorials are written under the assumption that you are using it with React.

Additionally, we see lots of people trying to learn Redux too early in their journey. It's bad enough that bootcamps throw people through "4 weeks of JS, 4 weeks of React, 4 weeks of Redux, GO!", and we can't do anything to stop that. We do want people to learn Redux, but we've found that it's best if most people are already comfortable with JS and a UI framework (which, again, is normally React), before they try to dive into Redux. That way there's fewer new terms and concepts to learn at once, and it's more clear what benefits Redux can add and how it fits into the UI layer.

If you'd like to focus on just the Redux core concepts, I'd recommend going through our "Redux Fundamentals" tutorial. It explains the underlying principles and techniques, and how Redux works:

https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-1-overview

There is content in the middle of that tutorial that explains how to use it with React, and if you want to use it with vanilla JS you'll have to recreate equivalents to some of those APIs yourself. But, the rest of the material should be directly relevant.

Also, please come by the Reactiflux Discord and ping us over in the #redux channel - we're happy to help answer questions!

Thanks for the pointers! Really helped clear things up.

I don't get why most projects need Redux when React has the context API already. Most people just need a place to store data shared across different components, and plain contexts do that easily.

They can, but for any reasonable sized application, you're basically recreating bare redux. If someone is good with both, it can architect and choses the correct one based on the needs of your software. But if you find that your global state needs are not small, you just chose redux - add a library like rematch on top to reduce boilerplate - so it's straightforward for your junior.

Out of curiosity, any particular reason you'd suggest Rematch instead of our official Redux Toolkit package?

If you're familiar with both already, are there any parts of Rematch's API you prefer over RTK's, that we should consider looking at for inspiration?

Because Redux and Context are different tools that solve different problems, with some overlap.

Context is a Dependency Injection tool for a single value. Note that it doesn't "manage" or "store" anything - it's just a tube that you can pass something through. Any actual "storage" is normally done with React's own `useState/useReducer` hooks, which actually _do_ store and update values.

Redux, meanwhile, is a tool for predictable state management outside React. Very different kind of tool, for a different purpose.

More details:

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...

because context re-renders everything all the time

Redux historically had a pretty terrible API. Next stop: Boilerplate-ville.

But it's based on a sound model. Go and check out elm, the project redux copied its structure from and you'll see what that model is capable of achieving in a decent language.

Today with hooks Redux is not too bad but still subpar. I used for years my own simplified store, these days I just use zustand.

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