Should getter be separated from setter in Signals?

[Spades-S]

getter setter separation may be a good base for one-way data flow

[littledan]

Hilariously, the README currently says

(See implications below in the "Capability separation" section.)

But that section doesn't exist! Anyway the basic point is: yes, I agree, we should encourage one-way dataflow, but this works out very cleanly as something to implement on top of the Signal.State class, and doesn't need to be the shape of its built-in API. This relates to our expectation that most frameworks (especially those implementing this capability separation) will wrap Signals for their own ergonomics (e.g., to make calling it be the way to get the value).

The reason for having them be the same object is a sort of micro-optimization: this avoids allocating two (or really three) objects. Because many frameworks will wrap them for different ergonomics, there will already be a separate allocation in practice that can implement this capability separation. No need to do that twice.

[Spades-S]

Application developer may get diverse signal APIs from UI frameworks, e.g. .value style in Preact, [getValue, setValue] style in Solidjs. Is it possible to remove the wrapper in frameworks? Framework developers and application developers use the same API, follow the same specs.

[NullVoxPopuli]

You may be interested in this issue:

• Usage patterns and library-author api design (for consumers of signals) #74

It's currently on the library/framework author to to ergonomicify APIs.
There will still probably be room for an abstraction project, as frameworks tend to have (and want) varying semantics around effects, rendering, destruction/cleanup, timing of all these, etc (Starbeam is one such project, but is an exploratory project for now)

[Spades-S]

@NullVoxPopuli Thanks for sharing

[WebReflection]

Imho the current proposal and polyfill works like a charm already and if a library wants to expose a read-only signal it has already the primitive to do so: Signal.Computed:

import { Signal } from 'this-proposal';

const pvt = new Signal.State(0);

export default new Signal.Computed(() => pvt.get());

// from this module author / ownership
setTimeout(() => {
  pvt.set(pvt.get() + 1);
}, 1000);

This way anyone can effect on that computed as read-only signal as the API is equivalent around the .get() behavior and I don't find it particularly complicated or convoluted.

In alternative one can always wrap a signal and expose the get only or the set one, for whatever use case.

class GetValue {
  #signal;
  constructor(signal) {
    this.#signal = signal;
  }
  get() {
    return this.#signal.get();
  }
}

class SetValue {
  #signal;
  constructor(signal) {
    this.#signal = signal;
  }
  set(value) {
    this.#signal.set(value);
  }
}

const getInteral = new Signal.State(0);
const setInternal = new Signal.State(0);

export const getOnly = new GetValue(getInteral);
export const setOnly = new SetValue(setInternal);

effect(() => {
  setInternal.get();
  // get notified any time that value changes
});

[d8corp]

I like when a getter and setter combined in one entity.

In React I saw a warning like: "You provided a value prop to a form field without an onChange handler..." that is close to the question.

An example, which pushes to like the combining:

import innet from 'innet'
import dom from '@innet/dom'
import { State } from 'watch-state'

import { Input } from '@cantinc/ui'

const label = new State('test')

innet(
  <>
    <Input value={label} />
    <Input label={label} />
  </>,
  dom,
)

The first Input controls a label of the second one, so simple.

[ljharb]

Related: #124