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Immutable.js vs Underscore: What are the differences?
Developers describe Immutable.js as "Immutable persistent data collections for Javascript which increase efficiency and simplicity, by Facebook". Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data. On the other hand, Underscore is detailed as "JavaScript's utility _ belt". A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.
Immutable.js and Underscore can be primarily classified as "Javascript Utilities & Libraries" tools.
"Immutable data structures" is the top reason why over 6 developers like Immutable.js, while over 83 developers mention "Utility" as the leading cause for choosing Underscore.
Immutable.js and Underscore are both open source tools. Immutable.js with 27.6K GitHub stars and 1.6K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Underscore with 24.6K GitHub stars and 5.41K GitHub forks.
Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Underscore, whereas Immutable.js is used by Instagram, Rove.me, and Broadly. Underscore has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1047 company stacks & 76 developers stacks; compared to Immutable.js, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) provides standard data objects in JSON format for the healthcare industry. Since JSON objects are hierarchical and tree-like, we had a need to defensively 'pluck' fields from our JSON objects and do lots of mapping. We tried jQuery and Underscore and a few other technologies like FHIRPath; but Lodash has been the most well supported, works in the most contexts, has the cleanest syntax, etc. We particularly like the ES6 version of Lodash, where we can import the method names directly, without resorting to * or _ syntax. We got hooked on the 'get' function to defensively pluck fields from objects without crashing our user interface, and have found countless uses for the other lodash functions throughout our apps.
Lodash is great for developing and optimizing algorithms.
Pros of Immutable.js
- Immutable data structures8
- Allows you to mimic functional programming5
- Bring the functional experience to JS2
- Makes writing Javascript less scary1
- Easily transpiles to different ES standards1
Pros of Underscore
- Utility85
- Simple55
- Functional programming40
- Fast32
- Open source28
- Backbone20
- Javascript16
- Annotated source code8
- Library6
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