FuncUI without Elmish

[GaryCorby]

The idea of a pure F# layer over Avalonia is super interesting, so thanks for putting it together. It seems to work very well.

I've only just been playing around with FuncUI, so this is a question born of 99% ignorance: Why in general would you want to be doing this with Elmish? I read through the source of ElmishHook.fs and I couldn't see that it does anything other than eventually direct you to a function.

As a test I didn't open FuncUI.Elmish. Instead I implemented the type Model{} with a static member this.Create() and a member this.Update(). Then I instantiated the Model type with

let model = Model.Create

The view is defined as "let View() = " without reference to the dispatcher (which doesn't exist) nor the Model (which was instantiated a few lines above).

Within View, calls to model.Update() do the same thing as the dispatcher, as far as I can see. If you want a single Update() method that branches on Msg that works, or else do multiple update methods. Either way you've still implemented an MVU structure. And either way in a real-world system you're probably heading into Fable.Remoting and the SAFE stack anyway.

This all works fine. Or am I wrong?

[JaggerJo]

Hey @GaryCorby

You can use FuncUI without using (or even referencing) Elmish. All functionality related to Elmish is in a separate Project. Some people really like the MVU model and the useElmish hook allows nice integration of MVU code islands. It's also possible to write classic Elmish apps.

I personally, after having used Elm like MVU libraries in production codebases, would advise against it. The React inspired component model, that FuncUI also offers, works a lot better in my opinion.

[GaryCorby]

Thanks @JaggerJo that's a very useful answer! I'll keep experimenting.