I'm not sure I follow your first point. What's the meaning and issue with "updates only happen on explicit state updates? Per the "non-React components" aspec

I'm not sure I follow your first point. What's the meaning and issue with "updates only happen on explicit state updates? Per the "non-React components" aspect: wrapping up non-React code into components is actually something React is pretty good at. The typical implementation of a maps lib wrapper component would have React render a single div with a ref, then use `componentDidMount` to initialize the plain JS lib and hand it the div. From there, the lib can attach any extra elements it wants, and React won't care. React's lifecycle methods like `componentWillReceiveProps` and `componentDidUpdate` are used to call the imperative lib APIs, and the lib would be cleaned up in `componentWillUnmount`. I wrote a blog post that demonstrates using React components to wrap up the Cesium 3D globe library [0], there was a great talk at ReactBoston that shows doing the same for Mapbox [1], and I have links to other similar articles about interacting with non-React code [2]. Per my other comments elsewhere in the thread, it's up to you how much abstraction you want to use for actions and reducers. A common suggestion is the Redux-Actions lib, which provides utilities for defining action creators and reducers. You can even use the action creators themselves as the "constants" for the reducer cases, since they have custom `toString()` methods. Also, switch statements aren't a requirement either - they're just the most obvious way of handling multiple values in a single `action.type` field. You can write whatever conditional logic you want in a reducer. All that said, I do agree that the JS language as a whole does not have the built-in pattern matching capabilities that other languages have. [0] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/03/declarative-earth-part-2-cesium-react/ http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/03/declarative-earth-p... [1] https://speakerdeck.com/shortdiv/supercharge-your-maps https://speakerdeck.com/shortdiv/supercharge-your-maps [2] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master/react-component-patterns.md#wrapping-non-react-code https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master... [3] https://github.com/redux-actions/redux-actions https://github.com/redux-actions/redux-actions