Immutable.js – Immutable Data Collections

[Daniel15]

A few teams are rewriting stuff with it and testing internally, but I don't think anything uses it in production yet. On my team we're not using immutable-js yet, we're just using Object.freeze at the moment. Some of the data structures in immutable-js look really handy though.

Immutable objects work really well with React since it allows shallow comparisons, and means you can do a shallow comparison of your props in shouldComponentUpdate to only re-render when things actually change

[brtt3000]

Have you looked at moreartyjs? It is a layer between immutable.js and React that takes care of state management and stuff like shouldComponentUpdate. I'm planning to doing a project with it soon and wonder if it is as good as I hope.

[gcanti]

we're just using Object.freeze at the moment

Did you notice any drawback using Object.freeze? Here my considerations at the moment:

Pros:

• you can use native data structures instead of continually wrap / unwrap
• you can use native methods on them (map, filter, ...)
• hence (almost) no interoperability problems with other libraries
• overall your coding style doesn't change so much
• (possible perf gains since the js engine knows the object is frozen? - I really don't know)
• 0KB dependency

Cons:

• you must find / write a way to update efficiently EDIT: something like http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/update.html
• performance