Redux and Mint Store Comparison

[jgarte]

Hi,

How does React Redux compare to Mint's concept of a store?

[ryanprior]

Redux stores and Mint stores are quite similar: you have some state (which in Redux is a "pojo" and in a Mint store or component is the sum of all its state declarations) and various functions which take the current state of the store as an argument and return the new state of the store. In Redux these are called "reducers" (as in the reduce higher-order function; all the state transitions are reductions as such) while in Mint these are functions which use the next keyword.

A library in the redux space which I would like to see as a Mint feature is redux-undo, which takes a reducer as an argument and returns an "undo-able" reducer which remembers all the states it's been in, past present & future. This makes it very easy to implement "undo/redo" features in any app which uses redux. They use this to great effect in the redux dev tools browser extension to automatically instrument all your reducers and capture the full timeline of state transitions in your application, giving you "time travel" debugging.

[gdotdesign]

For undo-redo functionality, I suggest porting UndoList. I used it back then and worked perfectly 🙂 It's basically a wrapper type so you can have anything undoable. I've started an implementation in a sandbox for reference: https://mint-lang.com/sandbox/gVC9JyxeZJA8Dg (basic functionality).

Having undo-redo implementation in the language itself would mean that we would need to have a bunch of new keywords (and maybe syntax) since we need to have reflection as well (for the past and future states) also not everyone needs this functionality. So too much complexity as a language feature IMHO, but having a type and module for it in the core would be great!