Signals Overview

@ecopages/signals is a renderer-agnostic signals package that can be used standalone or underneath Radiant.

Its model is based on the TC39 Signals proposal, with a smaller surface area and a few convenience helpers for real application code today.

Scope

This package provides:

• State<T> for writable values
• Computed<T> for lazily derived values
• effect(...) for reactive side effects
• watch(...) for observing derived values with previous-value access
• untrack(...) and peek(...) for non-tracking reads
• subtle.Watcher plus watched and unwatched hooks for low-level invalidation workflows
• createStore(...) and snapshot(...) for deep reactive object and array state

Design Position

This package is intentionally renderer-agnostic.

• It does not know about JSX.
• It does not know about Radiant components.
• It is meant to work standalone or underneath adapters in those packages.

TC39 Relationship

The package tracks the same broad model around:

• State and Computed
• lazy pull-based recomputation with caching
• automatic dependency discovery during computed evaluation
• custom equality functions
• untracked reads as an escape hatch

It is not a drop-in implementation of the current proposal draft.

How It Connects To Radiant

@ecopages/radiant depends on @ecopages/signals directly, so installing radiant brings this package transitively. You do not need a separate signals install for the standard radiant + jsx setup.

Radiant builds on top of this package in two main ways:

• @signal turns a host field into a real writable signal
• createResource(...) from @ecopages/radiant ties async state to a host lifecycle

That split is intentional:

• @ecopages/signals stays renderer-agnostic
• @ecopages/radiant adds host-aware behavior on top of signals

Next Pages

• See Signals State & Computed
• See Signals Effects
• See Signals Stores
• See Resources