Comparing React state tools: Mutative vs. Immer vs. reducers

React developers have a variety of state management solutions to choose from, including Reducer, Immer, and Mutative, each offering distinct approaches to managing immutable states. While reducers are a fundamental concept in React, providing a pure function that facilitates state modification via actions, Immer simplifies the process by allowing developers to write mutations as if the data were mutable, creating immutable updates by copying data and applying mutations to the copy. Mutative, a more recent library, claims superior performance to both reducers and Immer, offering efficient immutable updates with a robust API that supports custom shallow copy and safer mutable data access. Performance benchmarks indicate that Mutative excels in handling large data volumes, outperforming both reducers and Immer, making it a compelling choice for optimizing performance in React applications. Despite reducers being the most commonly used due to their integration with React, Mutative offers a powerful alternative, especially when managing extensive datasets.