Motivation

Valdres was created due to performance issues encountered building an offline-first process model editor. We started with Recoil, then moved to Jotai when the Recoil project appeared to be abandoned — but ran into performance bottlenecks with Jotai as well.

The core insight was that useSyncExternalStore (used by Zustand) provides better React integration performance than the useEffect + useReducer pattern used by Jotai. Valdres combines the atom-based model of Recoil/Jotai with the subscription approach of Zustand.

Design Principles

• Performance first — designed for apps with hundreds of atoms and frequent updates
• Separate atoms and selectors — clearer mental model than Jotai's unified atom concept
• First-class families — atomFamily and selectorFamily are core primitives, not utilities
• Transactions — batch multiple updates so subscribers fire once
• No framework lock-in — the core valdres package has zero dependencies and works outside React