Why *Model isn't a standart in Bubble Tea?

[lictw]

Hi! Why passing/storing child models by references isn't a standart in Bubble Tea?

Now of course I can have references, but it doesn't make much sense while internal methods don't use pointer receivers (list.Update() for ex.), and vice versa it adds a lot of ugly cause models are not intended to be used by references, New() for ex. return value.

Using references leads to simplicity - now we should always update value of model, have separate field to indicate that it's active, but just with pointer receiver we will be able to do this in main.Update():

if m.list != nil {
  cmds = append(cmds, m.list.Update(msg)) // list.Update -> tea.Cmd
}

Models often is big (list.Model is big enough), so there is also a performance reason. And in the end, interfaces in Go love references, interface is reference, passing a value to interface results in another copy, where Go store value internally and anyway takes reference to it for interface value.

So, isn't changing this standard a good idea for the Bubble Tea v2, or is there some reason that I don't understand why this's done in that way?

[filipenf]

I'm also curious about this. AFAICT the reason for using copies is immutability: ie there's no risk of concurrent changes to the model and that is a pretty compelling reason. Wondering what can be done to avoid copying large objects though

I was surprised that the List model is about 20k in size

Passing it around as reference would be more efficient. Is the suggestion to embed sub-models as references instead?

[filipenf]

After reading another thread on this: charmbracelet/bubbletea#434

It looks like using *Model seem to be the way people use it in general