[trulyme]

Kudos on Redux Toolkit! Anyone who complains about boilerplate with Redux has obviously not tried the Toolkit version. Very impressive.

A bit sad that immer was used (a bit too much magic for my taste), but I can understand the reasoning, and if you just accept it, it's ok.

Thank you and all the other maintainers for your work!!!

[acemarke]

Yeah, concerns about Immer have come up a number of times. The usual concerns people have are:

- Too much "magic" as you said

- Proxy-wrapped data values can be harder to inspect in the browser's debugger

- Seeing "mutating" code may be confusing

I understand those, but from my perspective the benefits of Immer far outweigh any potential negatives.

Ultimately all Immer does is track attempted mutations to nested data, and replay them to create the immutable updates as if you'd done all the nested spread operators yourself. There were dozens of immutable update libs in the ecosystem already (I had listed most of them in my Redux addons catalog), and accidental mutations have always been the number 1 cause of bugs in Redux apps. So, a better way to write immutable updates was clearly valuable.

Immer drastically simplifies all that update logic:

- Removes all the extra object spreads and slices and concats you would have had to write previously, so the code is much shorter and easier to read. It's also more clear what the actual intent of the state update is.

- It also completely eliminates accidental mutations _in_ reducers, and also _out_ of reducers by freezing the state.

So, shorter code, easier to read, and eliminates the #1 cause of Redux bugs.

The tradeoffs are a couple KB of bundle size (which is quickly paid for by having shorter reducers), and needing to understand that Immer is there and doing this "magic" for you.

The one still slightly nagging annoyance is that inspecting Proxy-wrapped data in a debugger is painful, but Immer does supply a `current()` util to extract the plain JS data if you need to, and we document doing that:

https://redux-toolkit.js.org/usage/immer-reducers#debugging-...

So, as with all tools Immer isn't 100% perfect, but it was absolutely the right choice to include it in RTK by default.

[trulyme]

Thank you for the detailed response! My experience seems to be different, as in my opinion immer solves a problem that should not arise in nice code (in most cases) - state should not be that deep anyway. It also takes away a bit of the simplicity of Redux which is its greatest strength, imho.

But as I said, I still highly recommend Redux Toolkit. After dealing with the code using MobX and the complexities brought by its reactions, I would take Redux anytime. Immer is just a small unfortunate detail, but I can live with it.

[theteapot]

> Kudos on Redux Toolkit! Anyone who complains about boilerplate with Redux has obviously not tried the Toolkit version.

You still have to understand Redux's weird boiler plate concepts - actions, action creator functions, reducers, thunks, ... - to understand and use Redux toolkit. Redux is broken from the bottom up.

[trulyme]

They are pretty simple though, and the dev tools are fabulous. I guess we disagree here. :)

Note that I would never (again) use thunk - using such side effects leads to unmaintainable code, at least in my experience.

[tunesmith]

This was exactly my reticence... back when I was learning various approaches and trying to come up with a first-principles derivation of which way to go, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to avoid immer like the plague. So discovering that RTK requires it has made it difficult to consider embracing.

[acemarke]

I'm very curious, what concerns do you have about Immer? fwiw I just wrote a sibling comment that goes into some detail on what problems Immer solves and why we included it in RTK:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599980

[trulyme]

Still worth it though, imho - if you have a chance do give it a try. It makes Redux much less verbose and is an ideal abstraction for state management. It never bothered me that much, but forking Redux Toolkit and removing Immer is still an option if you feel strongly about it (should probably be easy).