Why I stopped using Redux and Used Recoil Instead

What's wrong with Redux?

Redux is not perfect, but it is by far the most popular state management library used with React. Let's look at what's not so great in redux:

• Giant Learning Curve
  There are so many concepts to learn like actions, action creator, reducers... and when we throw class based and functional components in the mix along with a different way of dispatching while using thunk etc, It can really scare a beginner

• Huge Amount of Boilerplate
  Everytime we want to setup a redux app, we have to create reducers, combine them, create a store, add middleware, link to devtools, computed values etc. We need to add so many 3rd party libraries which have a config of their own and introduce another layer of complexity.

• Restructuring Folder Structure
  The react component based approach does not align itself very well with the redux way of splitting business logic. If we want to introduce redux into an existing react app, then we need to change the file structure and a lot of code has to be changed.

Context API

The context API is not really a solution for this. It solves the prop drilling problem... not global application state. You cannot pass data across siblings using context. The child will have to update the parent which will update another child(the sibling).

Terminology with Recoil

Unlike redux where we have so many concepts to understand... there are only a few in Recoil

Atom

This is the easiest part of the terminology.... an atom is basically a piece of state

Selector

A piece of state that is calculated on the basis of another atom(s) or selector(s)

Recoil

Let's begin by installing recoil

npm i recoil

Whenever we want to use recoil, we need to have the RecoilRoot component somewhere in our component tree.

import React from 'react';
import {RecoilRoot} from 'root';

export default function App() {
  return (
    <RecoilRoot>
      <h1>Recoil Demo</h1>
    </RecoilRoot>
  )
}

When we want to create an atom, we use the atom function.

import React from 'react';
import { RecoilRoot, atom } from 'recoil';

const counter = atom({
  key: "counter",
  default: "0"
});

export default function App() {
  return (
    <RecoilRoot>
      <h1>Recoil Demo</h1>
    </RecoilRoot>
  )
}

Each atom() takes in 2 fields:

1. Key
   The key is the name our atom. It must be unique in our application and we use it to get the value of the atom.

2. Default
   The default is the initial value of our atom

We've created an atom but we'll also need to access it. We use the useRecoilState hook

import React from 'react';
import {RecoilRoot, useRecoilState, atom} from 'root';

const counter = atom({
  key: "counter",
  default: "0"
});

export default function App() {
  const [number, setNumber] = useRecoilState(counter);

  return (
    <RecoilRoot>
      <h1>Recoil Demo</h1>
      <button onClick={() => setNumber(number + 1)}>{number}</button>
    </RecoilRoot>
  )
}

We pass in the counter atom to the useRecoilState. Very similar to the useState hook in react, useRecoilState also returns the value of the state and a function to set the state.

I've added a simple button that shows the value of number. When we click on it, we increment the number state using the setNumber() function.

This atom can be used in another component too. In case we only want to access the value of the number atom, we can use the useRecoilHook.

function Display() {
  const number = useRecoilValue(counter);
  return <p>{number}</p>
}

Derived State

Let's begin by understanding what derived state actually is. It's a piece of state that is calculated on the basis of another state.

It's very easy to do this in recoil. We can use the selector() function. A selector is a pure function that takes in atoms or other selectors. We'll cube the value of our counter.

const cubed = selector({
  key: "cube",
  get: ({ get }) => get(counter) ** 3
})

The key field is nothing new... it specifies the name of our state, as I mentioned earlier, It must always be unique. The get field is where things get interesting. I agree it the syntax is complicated but this gives us a lot of power and expands the possibilities. Whenever an atom which the selector uses changes, the selector is recalculated Let's go through the code line by line.

We are giving a function to the get field. Recoil passes an object into that, from this object we are destructuring the get field. The get field is a function that allows use to pass in the key of an atom or selector and access it's value. Then we are raising it to the power of 3. Here we have used only one atom but we can use multiple atoms for computations.

import {selector} from 'recoil';

const cubed = selector({
  key: "totalPrice",
  get: ({ get }) => {
    get(numState) ** 3
  }
})

Folder Structure

Let's say the we have 2 broad categories of state in our app: users and todos. All the atoms go in /atoms and the selectors go in /selectors. The atoms related to users will go in /atoms/users.js, the atoms related to todos will go in /atoms/todos.js and so on.

That's all for now, thank you for reading until here. I hope you guys liked this post, if you did please like the post and follow me. Bye 👋

Comments

[Diogo Goncalves]

I don't know why people still use Redux. Recoil is much simpler and easier!

[John Frades]

Redux is already an established library and well maintained. If you're working on a commercial product, adding a library because its simpler and easier isn't always the case. Especially that Recoil is still in Experimental stage. Companies jwouldn't risk their product using an experimental stage library

[Nico Zerpa (he/him)]

Redux has been so popular for a long time. That means there are lots of libraries that work well with it. As Recoil is still a young project, you don't have so many libraries available, at least for now.

Also, there are tons of information online about Redux. That's very useful if you find a bug or a problem using the library because it will be easier to find how others solved that problem.

If you use Recoil and something goes wrong, it will be way harder to google how to solve it. That's also because it's a new tool.

Redux is better suited for large, complex applications. In these large codebases, the boilerplate code isn't that much of a problem.

[Nikola Stojaković]

Most probably because of the ecosystem. That's one of the primary reasons why most of the websites still use PHP. Also, Recoil is an experimental library.

[jyooi]

I don't know why those people thinking of other ppl using that library are not a good idea. They don't understand there always have the legacy codebase and it is still working fine. People don't risk their production code with those experimental libraryy.

[Foyzul Karim]

Still there are thousands of React apps which are using class components, for various reasons. How can we use recoil in these projects?
What I do is, I mix and match the redux and react state in my app and it works just fine.

[Blow Fish]

I've been using recoil in production and I know others who use it in production too.
I disagree with people saying what if so and so happens . Tbh there isn't a lot that can go wrong (Its not redux) . Also not to forget that recoil has 13k stars on github and for a good reason.

In the end it all matters where you want to fall in the technology lifecycle.
Yes you will be early adopters but the ease to work with recoil makes it very favourable.

I'm not saying to ditch Redux halfway (you probably shouldn't). It does it's job well, but do give recoil a try for your next project 💁🏻‍♂️

[Akash Shyam]

If you look at the title, i'm not asking people to switch to recoil and throw redux in the bin. I'm just saying my viewpoint. If a beginner is learning react and has just learned the concept of "hooks".... recoil is much easier to grasp. Then maybe he can move onto redux. I took almost 2-3 months to properly grasp redux. On the flip side, i learned recoil in a day or two. Redux has so many ways to dispatch/connect to state and when we use something like redux thunk we have a different way of dispatching. I'm not saying not to use redux, I'm just advocating recoil as an option. Of course recoil has it's disadvantages.

[Ross Henderson]

We seriously considered Recoil, but for a commercial product we were concerned that the support for it just wasn't there yet. In a few years it'll be more popular that Redux, we think, but we just can't take that risk.

[Akash Shyam]

Did you guys consider zustand?

[Ross Henderson]

I haven't heard of it, I'll have a look!

[Nico Zerpa (he/him)]

So, Recoil is inspired by React Hooks... interesting!
Thank you for sharing, Akash 💯

[Akash Shyam]

Glad you liked it!

[Charles F. Munat]

So atom and selector are in global state somehow? I don't see where they are imported. And how does RecoilRoot know about them?

This doesn't make much sense to me. What am I missing?

[Akash Shyam]

Atom and selector are not in global state.... they have to be imported.

[Charles F. Munat]

So maybe show the imports in your examples? Examples should be complete and not assume any prior knowledge of the code you're explaining.

[Akash Shyam]

Actually the code snippet was getting very big and I did not want to bore the reader by showing the imports. Will add imports from now on, thanks!

[Akash Shyam]

I agree with you. Only stuff like auth should be stored globally. We should try and keep as much as we can in component level state except when we have to share props downwards in the component tree by many levels.

[Corentin Girard]

You are not importing useRecoilState() in the first snippet you mention it.

[Akash Shyam]

Thanks for the tip.... sorry about that input

[OliverRadini]

Is it possible to use recoil with frameworks/libraries other than react? One thing I like about Redux is that it disconnects state management from the rest of the frontend stack.

[Akash Shyam]

A state management library for React
Recoil official Website

Recoil was designed specifically for react to make it easy to use and adhere to the react idealogy

[OliverRadini]

One of the main advantages I've seen with React is that it doesn't try and enforce an ideology across the stack, but allows you to choose your own tools. I think that a distinct advantage of redux is that state management is framework agnostic.