Valdres vs Jotai

Valdres was created due to performance issues encountered building an offline-first process model editor. First with Recoil and then with Jotai due to the apparent abandonment of the Recoil project.

If you are a current Jotai user and want to quickly test out Valdres, we have a compatibility package that mirrors the Jotai API. Just change your imports:

// Before
import { atom, createStore } from "jotai"
// After
import { atom, createStore } from "@valdres-react/jotai"

Similarities

Storage

Jotai and Valdres have a similar approach to how atoms and selectors are stored internally. They both use WeakMap — if an atom or selector is no longer referenced it can be garbage collected.

Differences

React implementation

Jotai uses a combination of useEffect and useReducer while Valdres utilizes useSyncExternalStore, similar to the Zustand library. (The same developer has created both Zustand and Jotai.)

atom + selector

Jotai has a single concept for both state and derived state. Valdres separates stored state (atoms) from derived/aggregated state (selectors), similar to Recoil. Based on our experience building an app with several hundred atoms and selectors, we see a clear benefit to the mental model and code readability.

atomFamily / selectorFamily

In Jotai, atomFamily is a simple utility. In Valdres, atomFamily and selectorFamily are first-class citizens with a Recoil-like API. You can subscribe to an entire family and get all keys as an array.

Transactions

Recoil pioneered the ability to do transactions on state. Valdres brings this forward — you can batch multiple atom updates so subscribers only fire once. This is not an explicit part of Jotai.