immer

What is immer?

Immer is a package that allows you to work with immutable state in a more convenient way. It uses a copy-on-write mechanism to ensure that the original state is not mutated. Instead, Immer produces a new updated state based on the changes made within a 'produce' function. This approach simplifies the process of updating immutable data structures, especially in the context of modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as React and Redux.

What are immer's main functionalities?

Creating the next immutable state by modifying the current state

This feature allows you to pass a base state and a producer function to the 'produce' function. Within the producer function, you can mutate the draft state as if it were mutable. Immer takes care of applying the changes to produce the next immutable state.

import produce from 'immer';

const baseState = [
    {todo: 'Learn typescript', done: true},
    {todo: 'Try immer', done: false}
];

const nextState = produce(baseState, draftState => {
    draftState.push({todo: 'Tweet about it'});
    draftState[1].done = true;
});

Working with nested structures

Immer can handle deeply nested structures with ease. You can update deeply nested properties without the need to manually copy every level of the structure.

import produce from 'immer';

const baseState = {
    user: {
        name: 'Michele',
        age: 33,
        todos: [
            {title: 'Tweet about it', done: false}
        ]
    }
};

const nextState = produce(baseState, draftState => {
    draftState.user.age = 34;
    draftState.user.todos[0].done = true;
});

Currying

Immer supports currying, which means you can predefine a producer function and then apply it to different states. This is useful for creating reusable state transformers.

import produce from 'immer';

const baseState = {counter: 0};

const increment = produce(draft => {
    draft.counter++;
});

const nextState = increment(baseState);

Other packages similar to immer

immutable

Immutable.js is a library by Facebook that provides persistent immutable data structures. Unlike Immer, which allows you to write mutable code that gets converted to immutable updates, Immutable.js requires you to use specific methods to update data structures. It offers a wide range of data structures like List, Map, Set, etc.

mori

Mori is a library that brings Clojure's persistent data structures to JavaScript. It is similar to Immutable.js in that it provides a variety of immutable data structures and functional programming utilities. Mori's API is quite different from JavaScript's native arrays and objects, which can have a steeper learning curve compared to Immer.

seamless-immutable

Seamless-immutable is a library that provides immutability for your data structures without drastically changing the syntax of standard JavaScript objects and arrays. It is less powerful than Immer in terms of handling complex updates and nested structures but offers a simpler and more familiar API for those who prefer to work with plain JavaScript objects.

README

Immer

Create the next immutable state tree by simply modifying the current tree

---

• NPM / Yarn: npm install immer
• CDN: https://unpkg.com/immer/dist/immer.umd.js. Exposed global is immer.

---

• Egghead lesson covering all of immer (7m): Simplify creating immutable data trees with Immer
• Introduction blogpost: Immer: Immutability the easy way

Immer (German for: always) is a tiny package that allows you to work with immutable state in a more convenient way. It is based on the copy-on-write mechanism.

The basic idea is that you will apply all your changes to a temporarily draftState, which is a proxy of the currentState. Once all your mutations are completed, Immer will produce the nextState based on the mutations to the draft state. This means that you can interact with your data by simply modifying it, while keeping all the benefits of immutable data.

Using Immer is like having a personal assistant; he takes a letter (the current state), and gives you a copy (draft) to jot changes onto. Once you are done, the assistant will take your draft and produce the real immutable, final letter for you (the next state).

A mindful reader might notice that this is quite similar to withMutations of ImmutableJS. It is indeed, but generalized and applied to plain, native JavaScript data structures (arrays and objects) without further needing any library.

API

The Immer package exposes a default function that does all the work.

produce(currentState, producer: (draftState) => void): nextState

There is also a curried overload that is explained below

Example

import produce from "immer"

const baseState = [
    {
        todo: "Learn typescript",
        done: true
    },
    {
        todo: "Try immer",
        done: false
    }
]

const nextState = produce(baseState, draftState => {
    draftState.push({ todo: "Tweet about it" })
    draftState[1].done = true
})

The interesting thing about Immer is that the baseState will be untouched, but the nextState will reflect all changes made to draftState.

// the new item is only added to the next state,
// base state is unmodified
expect(baseState.length).toBe(2)
expect(nextState.length).toBe(3)

// same for the changed 'done' prop
expect(baseState[1].done).toBe(false)
expect(nextState[1].done).toBe(true)

// unchanged data is structurally shared
expect(nextState[0]).toBe(baseState[0])
// changed data not (dûh)
expect(nextState[1]).not.toBe(baseState[1])

Benefits

• Immutability with normal JavaScript objects and arrays. No new APIs to learn!
• Strongly typed, no string based paths selectors etc.
• Structural sharing out of the box
• Object freezing out of the box
• Deep updates are a breeze
• Boilerplate reduction. Less noise, more concise code.
• Small: bundled and minified: 2KB.

Read further to see all these benefits explained.

Reducer Example

Here is a simple example of the difference that Immer could make in practice.

// Redux reducer
// Shortened, based on: https://github.com/reactjs/redux/blob/master/examples/shopping-cart/src/reducers/products.js
const byId = (state, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case RECEIVE_PRODUCTS:
      return {
        ...state,
        ...action.products.reduce((obj, product) => {
          obj[product.id] = product
          return obj
        }, {})
      }
    default:
      return state
  }
}

After using Immer, that simply becomes:

import produce from 'immer'

const byId = (state, action) =>
  produce(state, draft => {
    switch (action.type) {
      case RECEIVE_PRODUCTS:
        action.products.forEach(product => {
          draft[product.id] = product
        })
    }
  })

Notice that it is not needed to handle the default case, a producer that doesn't do anything will simply return the original state.

Creating Redux reducer is just a sample application of the Immer package. Immer is not just designed to simplify Redux reducers. It can be used in any context where you have an immutable data tree that you want to clone and modify (with structural sharing).

Note: it might be tempting after using producers a while, to just put produce in your root reducer, and then past the draft along to each reducer and work on that. Don't do that. It kills the point of Redux where each reducer is testable as pure reducer. Immer is best used when applying it to small individual pieces of logic.

Currying

produce can be called with one or two arguments. The one argument version is intended to be used as currying. This means that you get a pre-pound producer, that only needs a state to produce the value from. The producer function get's passed in the draft, and any further arguments that were passed to the curried function.

For example:

// mapper will be of signature (state, index) => state
const mapper = produce((draft, index) => {
    draft.index = index
})

// example usage
console.dir([{}, {}, {}].map(mapper))
//[{index: 0}, {index: 1}, {index: 2}])

This mechanism can also nicely be leveraged to further simplify our example reducer:

import produce from 'immer'

const byId = produce((draft, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case RECEIVE_PRODUCTS:
    action.products.forEach(product => {
        draft[product.id] = product
    })
  }
})

Note that state is now factored out (the created reducer will accept a state, and invoke the bound producer with it). One think to keep in mind; you cannot use this construction to initialize an uninitialized state. E.g. draft = {} doesn't do anything useful.

Auto freezing

Immer automatically freezes any state trees that are modified using produce. This protects against accidental modifications of the state tree outside of a producer. This comes with a performance impact, so it is recommended to disable this option in production. It is by default enabled. Use setAutoFreeze(true / false) to turn this feature on or off.

Immer on older JavaScript environments?

By default produce tries to use proxies for optimal performance. However, on older JavaScript engines Proxy is not available. For example, when running Microsoft Internet Explorer or React Native on Android. In such cases Immer will fallback to an ES5 compatible implementation which works identical, but is a bit slower.

Pitfalls

1. Currently, Immer only supports plain objects and arrays. PRs are welcome for more language built-in types like Map and Set.
2. Immer only processes native arrays and plain objects (with a prototype of null or Object). Any other type of value will be treated verbatim! So if you modify a Map or Buffer (or whatever complex object from the draft state), the changes will be persisted. But, both in your new and old state! So, in such cases, make sure to always produce fresh instances if you want to keep your state truly immutable.
3. For example, working with Date objects is no problem, just make sure you never modify them (by using methods like setYear on an existing instance). Instead, always create fresh Date instances. Which is probably what you were unconsciously doing already.
4. Since Immer uses proxies, reading huge amounts of data from state comes with an overhead (especially in the ES5 implementation). If this ever becomes an issue (measure before you optimize!), do the current state analysis before entering the producer function or read from the currentState rather than the draftState
5. Some debuggers (at least Node 6 is known) have trouble debugging when Proxies are in play. Node 8 is known to work correctly.

How does Immer work?

Read the (second part of the) introduction blog.

Performance

Here is a simple benchmark on the performance of Immer. This test takes 100.000 todo items, and updates 10.000 of them. Freeze indicates that the state tree has been frozen after producing it. This is a development best practice, as it prevents developers from accidentally modifying the state tree.

These tests were executed on Node 8.4.0. Use yarn test:perf to reproduce them locally.

Some observations:

• The mutate, and deepclone, mutate benchmarks establish a baseline on how expensive changing the data is, without immutability (or structural sharing in the deep clone case).
• The reducer and naive reducer are implemented in typical Redux style reducers. The "smart" implementation slices the collection first, and then maps and freezes only the relevant todos. The "naive" implementation just maps over and processes the entire collection.
• Immer with proxies is roughly speaking twice as slow as a hand written reducer. This is in practice negligible.
• Immer is roughly as fast as ImmutableJS. However, the immutableJS + toJS makes clear the cost that often needs to be paid later; converting the immutableJS objects back to plain objects, to be able to pass them to components, over the network etc... (And there is also the upfront cost of converting data received from e.g. the server to immutable JS)
• The ES5 implementation of Immer is significantly slower. For most reducers this won't matter, but reducers that process large amounts of data might benefit from not (or only partially) using an Immer producer. Luckily, Immer is fully opt-in.
• The peeks in the frozen versions of just mutate, deepclone and naive reducer come from the fact that they recursively freeze the full state tree, while the other test cases only freeze the modified parts of the tree.

FAQ

(for those who skimmed the above instead of actually reading)

Q: Does Immer use structural sharing? So that my selectors can be memoized and such?

A: Yes

Q: Does Immer support deep updates?

A: Yes

Q: I can't rely on Proxies being present on my target environments. Can I use Immer?

A: Yes

Q: Can I typecheck my data structures when using Immer?

A: Yes

Q: Can I store Date objects, functions etc in my state tree when using Immer?

A: Yes

Q: Is it fast?

A: Yes

Q: Idea! Can Immer freeze the state for me?

A: Yes

Credits

Special thanks goes to @Mendix, which supports it's employees to experiment completely freely two full days a month, which formed the kick-start for this project.

Donations

A significant part of my OSS work is unpaid. So donations are greatly appreciated :)