One post tagged with "immutable"

This article basically takes time to learn about immer immer. If you don't know immer, I recommend reading next chapter first.

What is my curious?​

immer functions to return data immutably even when using the object built-in method that changes to be mutable. Let's find out how this function works internally.

This example is following basic example of immer official docs

import produce from 'immer';

const baseState = [
  { 
    title: "Learn TypeScript", 
    done: true,
  },
  { 
    title: "Try Immer", 
    done: false,
  },
]

const nextState = produce(baseState, (draft) => {
  draft.push({ title: "Tweet about It" });
  draft[1].done = true;
})

console.log(baseState === nextState) // false
console.log(nextState)
/*
[
  { 
    title: "Learn TypeScript", 
    done: true,
  },
  { 
    title: "Learn TypeScript", 
    done: true,
  },
  { 
    title: "Tweet about It",
  },
]
*/

To update object immutably means that original object is copied to new object. In other word, copy needs to cost. When immer copy object, the unchanged reference copies the object using the structural sharing method that is reused. Let's find out what kind of structural sharing is used in immer.

When using an immer, there is a case of returning a new object instead of the mutable update method suggested above. This is same as the method of returning objects from javascript immutably regardless of the immer. immer officially is guiding this way and There will be many developers who use both methods, the method of changing objects to be mutable and method of changing objects to be immutable. Let's see what logic differences these differences cause in the immer.

// mutable method
const nextState = produce(baseState, (draft) => {
  draft.push({ title: "Tweet about It" });
  draft[1].done = true;
})

// immutable method
const nextState = produce(baseState, (draft) => {
  return {
    ...baseState,
    { ...baseState[1], done: true },
    { title: "Tweet about It" },
  }
})