alien-signals

alien-signals

Project Status: Preview

The goal of alien-signals is to create a push-pull model based signal library with the lowest overhead.

We have set the following scheduling logic constraints:

1. No dynamic object fields
2. No use of Array/Set/Map
3. No recursion calls
4. Class properties must be fewer than 10 (https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties)

Experimental results have shown that with these constraints, it is possible to achieve excellent performance for a Signal library without using sophisticated scheduling strategies. The overall performance of alien-signals is approximately 400% that of Vue 3.4's reactivity system.

For more detailed performance comparisons, please visit: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/js-reactivity-benchmark

Motivation

To achieve high-performance code generation in https://github.com/vuejs/language-tools, I needed to write some on-demand computed logic using Signals, but I couldn't find a low-cost Signal library that satisfied me.

In the past, I accumulated some knowledge of reactivity systems in https://github.com/vuejs/core/pull/5912, so I attempted to develop alien-signals with the goal of creating a Signal library with minimal memory usage and excellent performance.

Since Vue 3.5 switched to a Pull reactivity system in https://github.com/vuejs/core/pull/10397, I continued to research the Push-Pull reactivity system here. It is worth mentioning that I was inspired by the doubly-linked concept, but alien-signals does not use a similar implementation.

Adoptions

• Used in Vue language tools (https://github.com/vuejs/language-tools) for virtual code generation.

• The core reactivity system code was ported to Vue 3.6 and later. (https://github.com/vuejs/core/pull/12349)

Usage

Basic

import { signal, computed, effect } from 'alien-signals';

const count = signal(1);
const doubleCount = computed(() => count.get() * 2);

effect(() => {
  console.log(`Count is: ${count.get()}`);
}); // Console: Count is: 1

console.log(doubleCount.get()); // 2

count.set(2); // Console: Count is: 2

console.log(doubleCount.get()); // 4

Effect Scope

import { signal, effectScope } from 'alien-signals';

const count = signal(1);
const scope = effectScope();

scope.run(() => {
  effect(() => {
    console.log(`Count in scope: ${count.get()}`);
  }); // Console: Count in scope: 1

  count.set(2); // Console: Count in scope: 2
});

scope.stop();

count.set(3); // No console output

Roadmap

Version	Savings
0.3	Satisfy all 4 constraints
0.2	Correctly schedule computed side effects
0.1	Correctly schedule inner effect callbacks
0.0	Add APIs: signal(), computed(), effect(), effectScope(), startBatch(), endBatch()