Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

Immutable.js is a JavaScript library that will improve the robustness and dependability of your larger JavaScript projects. All aspects of the Immutable.js framework are covered in this book, and common JavaScript situations are examined in a hands-on way so that you gain practical experience using Immutable.js that you can apply across your own JavaScript projects. The key to building robust JavaScript applications using immutability is to control how data flows through your application, and how the side-effects of these flows are managed. Many problems that are difficult to pinpoint in large codebases stem from data that’s been mutated where it shouldn’t have been. With immutable data, you rule out an entire class of bugs. Mastering Immutable.js takes a practical, hands-on approach throughout, and shows you the ins and outs of the Immutable.js framework so that you can confidently build successful and dependable JavaScript projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Caching side-effects


By detecting that no changes have been made in a collection, you can skip the side-effect that would otherwise iterate over the collection, possibly running transformations along the way. Essentially, you're caching the side-effect. Usually, when you cache functions, you cache a value that's returned by the function. Side-effects are different because they effect the external environment in some way. For example, a UI component that uses an Immutable.js collection has been rendered. You then ask the component to render itself again, even though the collection that it uses hasn't changed at all. This side-effect can simply be ignored since it's already represented by the UI.

Let's build a generic mechanism that can be used to cache arbitrary side-effect functions:

const sideEffectCache = new WeakMap();
const sideEffect = fn => (...args) => {
  const cache = sideEffectCache.get(fn)
    || new Array(args.length);
const miss = Seq(args)
    .zip(cache)
    .some(([a...