Recoil - Facebook's State Management Experiment That Got Shelved

Recoil got axed, but before we shit on Facebook too hard, let's see what they actually built. Facebook dropped Recoil in 2020 because Redux was driving everyone insane. Way too much boilerplate, your entire app re-renders when you update a single fucking counter, and watching junior devs try to understand reducers is just painful. So they tried something different.

What Made Recoil Actually Smart

Instead of one massive store that forces every component to re-render when a single piece of state changes, Recoil split everything into atoms - tiny units of state that components subscribe to individually. Only subscribe to userNameAtom? Only re-renders when username changes, not when some unrelated cart item updates.

Atoms are just state containers - think useState but shareable across your entire app. Selectors compute derived state from atoms, like filtering a list or calculating totals. The magic happens because React only re-renders components that actually care about the changed atoms.

The atomic approach was actually brilliant. Facebook actually got this right for once. Components subscribe to exactly what they need, performance smokes Redux's everything-re-renders nightmare, and you don't need three different middleware libraries just to fetch some fucking data.

The Technical Stuff That Actually Worked

Dependency Tracking: Recoil builds a graph behind the scenes tracking which components depend on which atoms. Change an atom, and only the components using it re-render. No more wondering why your entire app re-renders when you update one piece of state.

Async Without the Middleware Hell: Selectors can be async functions that return promises. Need to fetch user data? Just make your selector async and Recoil handles loading states automatically. No Redux-Thunk, no Redux-Saga, just regular async/await.

Built for React 18: Unlike Redux which needed adapters, Recoil was designed for React's concurrent features from day one. Suspense, automatic batching, all that modern React stuff just works.

Developer Experience: The DevTools integration works great when it feels like it. Half the time the DevTools randomly shit the bed with Cannot read property '_recoil_state' of null and you're back to console.log debugging like a caveman, especially with complex selector chains. Still beats adding console.log('why the fuck is this undefined') everywhere, but Redux DevTools never randomly crash on you.

Why Facebook Killed It

September 7, 2023: Last commit to Recoil was just Flow error suppression. January 1, 2025: Meta officially archived the repository, making it read-only. The repo has 19.6k stars, proving developers actually wanted this shit to work, but Facebook apparently had other priorities.

Here's the kicker: Recoil never escaped "experimental" status after 4+ fucking years. Version 0.7.7 from March 2023 was the final release - try explaining to your CTO why your entire user dashboard depends on an experimental library that Facebook just threw in the garbage. That's a fun meeting where you get to explain technical debt for 45 minutes.

The Recoil Legacy - What Actually Survived

Facebook might have killed Recoil, but the atomic state management idea didn't die. Jotai basically copied the best parts of Recoil and actually maintains it. Valtio took a different approach but solved similar problems with proxy-based reactivity.

The irony? These community alternatives are better maintained than Facebook's original. Jotai has full React 18 support, active development, and doesn't carry the baggage of being "experimental" forever. Sometimes the community does it better than Big Tech.

Now that we've covered what Recoil was and how it stacks up against alternatives, let's address the elephant in the room: what do you actually do if you're stuck with it?

Meta abandoned Recoil development, but let's be real - your app isn't going to explode tomorrow. Still, using a dead library in production is like building on quicksand. Here's the actual situation.

Why You Should Actually Care

No More Bug Fixes: Found a bug? Congrats, you just inherited Facebook's technical debt. That weird race condition in concurrent mode that throws TypeError: Cannot read property of undefined (reading '_recoil') at 2am when your async selectors overlap? It's permanently broken now. I've debugged this exact error three times across different apps - always happens during high traffic when multiple state updates trigger concurrent renders. The Recoil community is too small to meaningfully fork and maintain this clusterfuck.

React 19 Compatibility: Recoil barely supports React 18 properly. React 19 shipped in December 2024 with new features, and you're stuck on older versions or dealing with weird compatibility issues. I've seen this movie before with other Facebook experiments.

Security Patches: Zero. None. If someone finds a vulnerability in Recoil's dependency graph or state management, nobody's fixing it. Your security team will not be happy when they audit your dependencies and find an abandoned library.

Figure Out What You're Actually Using

Before panicking about migration, audit your Recoil usage. Most teams use like 20% of Recoil's features anyway.

Count Your Atoms: How many atoms do you actually have? If it's under 20 and they're mostly simple state, Zustand will handle it easily. If you have complex selector chains and derived state everywhere, Jotai is your best bet since it's basically "Recoil but maintained."

Check Your Async Mess: Are you using async selectors heavily? That's where migration gets tricky. Jotai handles this similarly, but Zustand will require combining with SWR or React Query. Redux... well, good luck with that middleware hell.

Team Reality Check: Can your team handle learning something new? Jotai is the easiest transition - concepts map directly. Zustand makes you rethink state architecture, but it's way simpler once you get it. Redux requires sacrificing a junior developer to the boilerplate gods.

Your Migration Options (Ranked by Sanity)

Option 1: Jotai (The Obvious Choice)

Jotai is basically Recoil 2.0 but actually maintained. Same atomic concepts, same derived state patterns, but it works with React 18+ properly.

Why It's Easy: atom() works the same, useAtom() is nearly identical, and your async selectors translate directly. Most migrations take 1-2 weeks because you're not changing your mental model, just swapping the import statements.

I've migrated two production apps from Recoil to Jotai - one took 5 days, the other took 3 weeks when we discovered edge cases. The worst part wasn't the actual refactoring - it was sitting in a conference room explaining to the lead architect why we're abandoning a library we spent 6 months building features on. "But they look exactly the same" - yeah, try explaining why that matters when the original is dead in the water.

Option 2: Zustand (The Performance Win)

Zustand is tiny (~1KB) and fast. Instead of atoms, you get a store with selectors. Performance is genuinely better than Recoil's atomic approach for most use cases.

The Good: Bundle size drops significantly, re-renders are more predictable, and it integrates well with React DevTools. Your app will feel snappier.

The Pain: You need to rethink your state architecture. No more atoms and selectors - everything's a store slice. For async data, you'll need SWR or React Query alongside it.

Option 3: Redux Toolkit (The Enterprise Tax)

Redux Toolkit exists because someone needs to check the "battle-tested" box on architecture decisions. It's overkill for most apps, but enterprises love it.

Why Enterprises Pick It: Amazing DevTools, extensive middleware, predictable patterns that any developer can understand after 3 months of therapy.

Migration Reality: Plan 1-2 months minimum. You're not just changing libraries, you're changing how your entire team thinks about state. But hey, at least the DevTools are incredible.

How to Actually Do the Migration (Without Breaking Everything)

Week 1: Figure Out What You Have
Don't touch any code yet. Spend a depressing afternoon cataloging every atom, selector, and component that's married to Recoil. Find your performance bottlenecks and the places where Recoil is doing heavy lifting. Set up proper testing - you'll need it when everything breaks in ways you didn't expect.

Weeks 2-4: Start Small, Stay Paranoid
Pick the simplest, least-critical atoms first. Migrate one feature at a time, not the entire state tree at once. Keep both libraries running simultaneously during the transition - yeah it's ugly, but it keeps production stable.

Week 5: Clean Up the Mess
Remove Recoil from your bundle, update your linting rules, and fix any performance regressions you introduced. Update your team docs so the next developer doesn't spend a day trying to figure out why atoms aren't working.

Pro Tip: Use feature flags or you'll hate yourself. When your migration breaks user registration at 4pm on Friday (because of course it does), you want to flip a switch and fix it, not spend your weekend rolling back commits while your PM asks why the signup flow is dead. I learned this the hard way during a Recoil → Zustand migration that took down checkout for 2 hours.

Migrating from Recoil sucks, but maintaining an abandoned library sucks worse. Pick Jotai if you want the easy path, Zustand if you want performance, or Redux if your enterprise requires enterprise-level suffering. Just don't stay on Recoil - that technical debt compounds daily and will bite you when you least expect it.