The State of Reactive

There is some buzz about Reactive programming. I prepared a small comparison between some popular FRP libraries

Everything below is pretty subjective:)

RxJS

Pros:

• Documentation and big community.
• Shared interface with Rx* family. It’s a big advantage because you can adopt samples from RxJava community.
• A lot of primitives in the library and some samples how to use them
• back-pressure
• it is a kind of etalon for other libraries

Cons:

• Sometimes it looks overcomplicated
• Implemented with “Java” in mind. IMHO, concepts like schedulers are alien for Node.js

Bacon.js

Pros

• Really nice documentation with some advanced samples(snake game, implementation for example)
• a lot of primitives
• Implemented with JS in mind
• I found it is really easy to start

Cons

• it doesn’t implement back-pressure which makes it silly on backend

Highland.js

Pros:

• it’s intended to work with node.js(or browserify) environment which is really nice
• no alien concepts(from JavaScript/Node.js perspective)
• back-pressure
• the implementation is on top of Node stream which is really great idea
• small footprint

Cons:

• Silly documentation and no examples. Actually every time I’m trying to adopt samples from Rx or Bacon
• absence of some primitives. Actually you can implement most of them by yourself already implemented but it’s painful(see previous point)

Summary: because absence of samples you will learn them all:) IMHO, the most perspective one is Highland.js. But RxJs is much more mature

Tip: If you need to ask something on StackOverflow use RxJS dialect and translate it to youth

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