I've seen Effector, but hadn't seen Forest before. Effector is based on FRP concepts very similar to RxJS but with store based focus. Which is cool because in that context we can limit operations generally to map transformations and remove a lot of the "What 50 operators do I need to learn to get started?" issues typical observable libraries have.
In so it is really great way to created a directed graph with minimal API. It doesn't use things like proxies or dependency tracking since it's explicit. It supports the Observable standard too so you can hook it up to any place that can handle observables quite easily (gotta love how easy that is in Svelte).
Forest looks like a VDOM library created with Effector in mind. Which is pretty cool. But I think this is where you will start to see the motivation for things that Effector chooses not to do. The biggest benefit of auto-tracking like you find in fine-grained is that dependencies are constructed where they lie. Meaning that you can construct graphs without explicitly wiring things up. This is really great when trying to write inline expressions in templates or conditional logic. I always had this issue when trying to work with RxJS as a core change manager in a framework and there have been some projects to look at ways to alleviate this. Effector has the same limitation.
The thing is that looking at the way React or Svelte or Vue update, Forest can tell a pretty compelling tale. You can get a similar effect by driving things off this less framework integrated system. I mean put what you want in this box though really as most state management solutions more or less have the ability to drive a simple VDOM implementation on their own. The complexity comes in local state so who needs it? Not to start the debate again on local vs global state there are benefits to both approaches, but I do think that state management libraries like Effector that can work in a distributed way can do a good enough impression that you could make something pretty effective and pretty usable like this.
But if I was betting on the future, this isn't the sort of approach I'd be looking at on the framework side. State management, for sure.. But as you know I'm big on fine-grained and the reason is the granularity of update performance. Sure React, Vue, Svelte, don't get to leverage it in a way that makes it any better than what Forest is doing, but we shouldn't cut ourselves short there. The potential of well executed fine-grained reactivity has a much higher ceiling.
It is possible to do this with systems like Effector but it would be very verbose to create all the necessary subscriptions at that level and manage the dynamic nature of them. You'd have to do a lot of explicit work. Things perhaps you could analyze with a compiler, but until we got to a point of perfect analysis, something like proxies ensures we can do this sort of thing with no extra syntax and ultimate dynamicism.
Obviously this is all my opinion and I'm biased in this regard. But the performance that I've created with Solid is repeatable. We're already seeing it in early prototypes of future version of Marko. I imagine when things get rolling we may see more libraries like Vue or Svelte look at this work. Or not. After all the approaches I am using for fine-grained rendering in Solid have been around since at least 2016(I was not the first to experiment here). But where I currently stand nothing else is coming close in terms of streamlining DX and performance. Which is why I believe more people should be learning about fine-grained reactivity.
I've seen Effector, but hadn't seen Forest before. Effector is based on FRP concepts very similar to RxJS but with store based focus. Which is cool because in that context we can limit operations generally to
maptransformations and remove a lot of the "What 50 operators do I need to learn to get started?" issues typical observable libraries have.In so it is really great way to created a directed graph with minimal API. It doesn't use things like proxies or dependency tracking since it's explicit. It supports the Observable standard too so you can hook it up to any place that can handle observables quite easily (gotta love how easy that is in Svelte).
Forest looks like a VDOM library created with Effector in mind. Which is pretty cool. But I think this is where you will start to see the motivation for things that Effector chooses not to do. The biggest benefit of auto-tracking like you find in fine-grained is that dependencies are constructed where they lie. Meaning that you can construct graphs without explicitly wiring things up. This is really great when trying to write inline expressions in templates or conditional logic. I always had this issue when trying to work with RxJS as a core change manager in a framework and there have been some projects to look at ways to alleviate this. Effector has the same limitation.
The thing is that looking at the way React or Svelte or Vue update, Forest can tell a pretty compelling tale. You can get a similar effect by driving things off this less framework integrated system. I mean put what you want in this box though really as most state management solutions more or less have the ability to drive a simple VDOM implementation on their own. The complexity comes in local state so who needs it? Not to start the debate again on local vs global state there are benefits to both approaches, but I do think that state management libraries like Effector that can work in a distributed way can do a good enough impression that you could make something pretty effective and pretty usable like this.
But if I was betting on the future, this isn't the sort of approach I'd be looking at on the framework side. State management, for sure.. But as you know I'm big on fine-grained and the reason is the granularity of update performance. Sure React, Vue, Svelte, don't get to leverage it in a way that makes it any better than what Forest is doing, but we shouldn't cut ourselves short there. The potential of well executed fine-grained reactivity has a much higher ceiling.
It is possible to do this with systems like Effector but it would be very verbose to create all the necessary subscriptions at that level and manage the dynamic nature of them. You'd have to do a lot of explicit work. Things perhaps you could analyze with a compiler, but until we got to a point of perfect analysis, something like proxies ensures we can do this sort of thing with no extra syntax and ultimate dynamicism.
Obviously this is all my opinion and I'm biased in this regard. But the performance that I've created with Solid is repeatable. We're already seeing it in early prototypes of future version of Marko. I imagine when things get rolling we may see more libraries like Vue or Svelte look at this work. Or not. After all the approaches I am using for fine-grained rendering in Solid have been around since at least 2016(I was not the first to experiment here). But where I currently stand nothing else is coming close in terms of streamlining DX and performance. Which is why I believe more people should be learning about fine-grained reactivity.
Thank you for such a comprehensive answer!