There has been a lot of talk recently on Redux in terms of its place and future in React. Thread on my thoughts.
The “redux is dead” chatter comes around every six months or so but this time it came from the creator of Redux. (Not sure if that was his intent but it certainly got it started again)
Twitter did its thing. 🤣
Reddit did its thing. And here is a direct response to this from the maintainer of Redux.
reddit.com/r/reactjs/comm…
reddit.com/r/reactjs/comm…
Let’s take a look at the numbers from npm.
Redux has market dominance on state management and is still trending up at the same pace over the last two years. Not only that but it’s adoptance is still at a higher rate than some of the big competitors.
Redux has market dominance on state management and is still trending up at the same pace over the last two years. Not only that but it’s adoptance is still at a higher rate than some of the big competitors.
Look at the delta in adoptance for React and Redux. We can see they are in lock step with each other right up until around the time hooks were announced. React broke away and started being adopted faster than Redux. I am guessing this represents teams using a full hooks/context
I have no dog in the fight. If hooks is fully adopted by the community as a Redux replacement, switching over to useReducer/Context and remove Redux as a dependency would be fine.
However, I have still yet to see an example of a large team fully embrace hooks/useState/useReducer as their global state mgmt system. I have asked the core team directly and dug in to GitHub threads and have yet to hear specifically that they endorse this.
The patterns that are being created to handle a hooks/context only approach are currently sub-optimal at best IMHO.
A big complaint is the boilerplate that comes along with Redux. Officially, the redux team has created redux-starter-kit (unfortunately named and being renamed) which is intended to make Redux easier to work with and reduce the boilerplate.
redux-starter-kit.js.org/tutorials/basi…
redux-starter-kit.js.org/tutorials/basi…
Another complaint is Redux’s learning curve is steep but I would argue so is relay, hooks/Context and other solutions. Mobx is pretty simple but not significantly more so than Redux with RSK.
An interesting issue that is not clear to me regarding the future of Redux with React, is the seeming lack of vision for how Redux will fit into concurrent react, Suspense and render-as-you-fetch. We will have to wait and see how that plays out.
Overall, Redux has market dominance over state management in the ecosystem, is still growing at a higher rate than any other state management solutions and there doesn’t seem to be a suitable defecto stand-in as of yet.
