Skip to content
Daishi Kato edited this page Jul 14, 2021 · 11 revisions

How valtio works

This is to try describing the high level abstraction of valtio.

valtio has two kinds of proxies, for write and read. We intentionally separate them for hooks and concurrent react.

proxy() creates a proxy object to detect mutation, "proxy for write" snapshot() creates an immutable object from the proxy object useSnapshot() wraps the snapshot object again with another proxy (with proxy-compare) to detect property access, "proxy for read"


Suggestion notes:

  1. Starting with useSnapshot() what proxies are created and what are their conceptual names? Briefly, how is useMutableSource() source used to setup the subscription? It looks like there are listeners on a proxy, for deep property changes, how are those stored and tracked? What will trigger the subscription to be fired? Be detailed here.
  2. Walk through the flow of a property change for something non-trivial like address.person.name = "Bob" Step-by-step, from the moment of the assignment, what happens? How is the change notification queued? Is it through a React hook? When the change notification actually occurs, how is a re-render triggered? Leave no stone unturned as this is a very complicated interaction.