Supercharge Redux with ‘immer’: Using ‘immer’ to update Redux state in a more readable and safer way.

Using immer in Redux reducers can significantly improve the readability and maintainability of your code, while also helping to avoid potential issues that can arise when not using it. Here are some reasons why using immer is considered better:

1/Immutability Made Simple: One of the core principles of Redux is immutability, which helps ensure predictability and efficient state management. While the old way of updating the state using spread operators ({ ...state, counter: state.counter + 1 }) achieves immutability, it can become cumbersome and error-prone, especially when dealing with nested objects and arrays. immer simplifies the process by allowing you to directly modify a draft state while maintaining immutability.

2/Clarity and Readability: With immer, your code becomes more concise and expressive. The syntax closely resembles that of mutable updates, making it easier to understand what changes are being made to the state. This is particularly helpful when dealing with complex state structures or a series of updates.

3/No Need for Manual Cloning: When using the traditional approach, you need to manually clone nested objects and arrays to ensure immutability. With immer, you can update nested properties directly within the draft state, saving you from writing repetitive cloning code.

4/Avoiding Accidental Mutations: Without immer, it's possible to accidentally mutate the state, leading to unpredictable behavior in your application. With immer, you work on a draft state that is a copy of the original state, so you don't have to worry about unintentional mutations.

5/Performance Optimization: immer is designed to optimize the performance of updates. It creates a proxy layer over the draft state and applies updates lazily, only modifying the necessary parts of the state when changes are made.

6/Simplifying Complex Reducers: Reducers that handle complex state structures or deeply nested objects can become difficult to manage using the traditional approach. immer simplifies these scenarios by allowing you to directly modify the draft state in a natural and intuitive way.

While not using immer might not cause immediate issues, as your application grows, the codebase becomes more complex, and more developers get involved, the risk of introducing accidental mutations and decreasing code readability increases. Using immer helps mitigate these risks and leads to cleaner, more maintainable Redux code.