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When React state management is not enough, I use atoms

I'm a fan of Kent C. Dodds. He has an excellent blog, he holds office hours on Youtube and he manages an active Discord community focused on helping developers make maintainable React apps. I especially appreciate the way he thinks about state management in React apps. It does not have to be so reliant on external libraries. React itself is a library for managing state, so why not depend on its built-in abstractions.

On a React Native app I'm building, most (> 95%) of the state management is indeed done with the React primitives: useStates, Contexts, and Refs. It is a big pile of hook compositions, and that's the way I like it. If you are familiar with React and can read its documentation, you can understand the code.

There are a handful of places where using the primitives fall short, though. In these spots, plain old React hooks would require excessive glue code and would ultimately be confusing. Also, skipping needless renders in components such as forms can be tricky with the tools out of the box.

The savior is a shared state with an atom using Jotai! It has a simple useState-like API familiar to a React developer. It does not need stores, providers, or excessive boilerplate. Even the unit tests don't need anything special. I'll not detail how Jotai helps us, but it is a terrific tool to use sparingly.

Jotai was actually the second iteration of atomic state management: we initially used Recoil (0.1.X), but we decided to ditch that. It had some bugs, the most significant of which was a flaw where the selectors would trigger extra renders and not work as a selector should. This was more than six months ago, so I'm sure most of the issues are fixed.

Complying with Kent C. Dodds and plenty of other seasoned React developers, I'll design my React application around the React state management hooks and stick to them as much as possible. When the need arises to introduce something more sophisticated, I use a simple abstraction such as atoms. If the complexity with this abstraction is still too high compared to the added complexity introduced by something like Redux, MST, or Xstate, only then I'll start using them. I'll never start a React project by immediately tightly coupling it to another state management library.


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