Reincarnation of an old package

In 2020, react-relink was released. It was heavily inspired by recoil and had a similar API design.

react-relink was created with the goals of:

1. not needing to wrap components in Providers while still allowing states to be shared across different React components trees, and
2. make it easy to transition from recoil by introducing similar concepts and APIs.

As time goes on, the concepts of recoil were slowly disregarded, new features were added, and react-relink began to evolve into a state management library of it's own.

At that point, there were three main problems...

• The codebase became bloated and difficult to maintain
• It became so slow, that in some scenarios, it results in very noticeable lagging
• There was no easy way to use react-relink as a state management tool outside of React because the dependencies are tied together.

Eventually, the better solution was to create a new package two new packages — a core package and another one for its React bindings. This allows non-React projects to use this new state management library without needing to install react as a dependency, and the core package is called cotton-box.

cotton-box exposes three different types of State Managers that are built on top of one another for different needs:

• SimpleStateManager — the most lightweight state manager
• StateManager - generic state manager with lifecycle hooks for persisting data
• AsyncStateManager - similar to StateManager but supports async set-state functions

More information on the differences between these State Managers are available here.

If you're migrating from react-relink, it is highly recommended to check out the migration guide.