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> This is said often but without much qualification. I've found mutable data structures with change propagation (via observable or what not) to work much better

by Skinney 12y ago

> This is said often but without much qualification. I've found mutable data structures with change propagation (via observable or what not) to work much better given that the whole diffing thing can be avoided altogether since you know exactly what has changed. The problem with this though, is that the entire framework would have to be written around this idea, and everyone who uses the framework would have to use these datastructures correctly. That being said, it will probably be both more efficient and relatively easy to use once Object.observe lands in Ecmascript 7. In the meantime React works with every datastructure out there, which is a big plus. Immutable datastructures, while more expensive to change, could be very cheap to diff, because you know if two objects have the same pointer, they're equal.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> The problem with this though, is that the entire framework would have to be written around this idea, and everyone who uses the framework would have to use these datastructures correctly. That is the problem, and one of the reasons why I haven't ported Glitch (works in C#) to Javascript yet (instead, opting to wrap it up in a new language). > Immutable datastructures, while more expensive to change, could be very cheap to diff, because you know if two objects have the same pointer, they're equal. Yes, I use this property a lot in my own code; I'm pragmatic and use both mutable/immutable data structures. That being said, I find it easy to trace changes and do change propagation on a mutable data structure (that can change) vs. an immutable one (which obviously require diffing since you can't know exactly what changed). Using immutable data structures actually make that problem much harder from my point of view, but I see its utility as an easy way to integrate with existing code and programming practices (something I can't offer).

by Skinney 12y ago

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

> The problem with this though, is that the entire framework would have to be written around this idea, and everyone who uses the framework would have to use these datastructures correctly. That is the problem, and one of the reasons why I haven't ported Glitch (works in C#) to Javascript yet (instead, opting to wrap it up in a new language). > Immutable datastructures, while more expensive to change, could be very cheap to diff, because you know if two objects have the same pointer, they're equal. Yes, I use this property a lot in my own code; I'm pragmatic and use both mutable/immutable data structures. That being said, I find it easy to trace changes and do change propagation on a mutable data structure (that can change) vs. an immutable one (which obviously require diffing since you can't know exactly what changed). Using immutable data structures actually make that problem much harder from my point of view, but I see its utility as an easy way to integrate with existing code and programming practices (something I can't offer).