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by timhwang21 2016 days ago
One key difference between hooks and functions is that hooks tap into some hidden global component registry (I'm being handwavey here but this is more or less what happens). This allows side effects to be persisted and tracked between function calls.

You can probably build all this infrastructure yourself without hooks and only with plain functions. It'll involve some global store and some subscription mechanism. You'll end up with something really similar to Redux.
1 comments
valenterry 2015 days ago
> You can probably build all this infrastructure yourself without hooks and only with plain functions

It sounds to me that such a concept would be very useful in a lot of contexts, so instead of specializing it only to react hooks, it might be better to just be a standalone library. E.g., why not use the same technique in Angular?

That way, developers don't have to learn framework-specific ways of doing things again and again but can reuse their knowledge. I think the fact that everyone is building their own thing is one of the reasons why many people have this notion of "need to learn a new framework every half a year". Backend technology seems to do better here, maybe because the pace is slower?

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timhwang21 2015 days ago
> it might be better to just be a standalone library

See: https://github.com/reduxjs/redux, among others.

The React ecosystem did exactly this for the past few years, but evidently it was decided that a more native approach like hooks were better.

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valenterry 2015 days ago
I know redux, but I believe that there should be an even more low level library.

Coming from the backend, I miss something like the effect system builtin in Haskell/Purescript or added as a library to languages like Scala (e.g. https://typelevel.org/cats-effect/) or Kotlin (e.g. https://arrow-kt.io/docs/effects/io/)

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schwartzworld 2014 days ago
Hooks are not an alternative to redux, although you could use then as one.

Personally, any time anybody has ever suggested using redux I have always fought it. I've never seen the news for a global state management library, since react has always had tools to manage state built in.

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