Idiomatic Redux: Thoughts on Thunks, Sagas, Abstraction, and Reusability

Idiomatic Redux: Thoughts on Thunks, Sagas, Abstraction, and Reusability

The redux-thunk and redux-saga libraries are the most widely-used libraries for “side effects” in Redux. Both provide a place to make AJAX requests, dispatch multiple actions, access the current store state, and run other complex logic. redux-thunk does this by allowing you to pass a function to dispatch(), while redux-saga uses ES6 generators to execute asynchronous logic.

There’s been a lot of recent statements arguing that thunks (and sagas) are bad and should almost never be used. As a result, I’ve seen developers confused and wondering what alternatives they have to implement a given feature.

The concerns being raised are valid, but to balance the discussion, I would argue that thunks are a useful tool in Redux applications, and that developers should not be scared to use thunks in their codebase.

With those thoughts in mind, let’s dig into the discussions and see just what has been said about thunks.

Lots of good stuff in here. I can see a couple of things right away that I have noticed as problematic (duplication of async code, going “dispatch crazy” with chained actions) but struggled to find an obviously better solution.