# RxJS

11 Hacker News commenters recommended RxJS and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Reactive streams library for JavaScript that people praise for type safety and powerful operators for complex async flows. Most common caveat: complexity and hard debugging.

## Why people recommend it

- Preferred over signals for robustness (2 comments): "I also prefer the power of RxJS over signals" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090144)) "RxJS is far more robust than signals" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036944))
- Solves hard problems with operators (2 comments): "As with most RxJS problems the diamond dependency problem can often be fixed/solved with the right combination of even more advanced operators" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040948)) "RxJS solves, or gives you the tools to solve, most of these problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906894))
- Good when observables are truly needed (3 comments): "it's a genuinely cool library, as long as you don't spread observable around when you don't actually need them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399820)) "RxJS is cool where you actually need it and want it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48389100)) "theres rxjs if you need observables" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801588))

## What people warn about

- Hard to debug pipelines (3 comments): "it can be really tricky to figure out when a pipeline is ultimately stalling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346331)) "the code is more complex, and harder to debug, and so it has more bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345993)) "heavily layered and a pain to debug" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48387503))
- Painful for forms and state (3 comments): "It (and also React) gets worse if you add a state system like RxJS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47032568)) "having to use RxJS for forms became a major pain point" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48388888)) "rxjs was a bad choice for data management" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394250))
- Heavy bundle, weak tree-shaking (2 comments): "RXJS is also 18 MB which is irritating in a backend but completely bonkers in a frontend." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038284)) "RxJS still doesn't have a proper ESM build in 2026 for even better tree-shaking" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041053))
- Adds complexity and learning burden (2 comments): "does come with the added overhead and complexity that rxjs brings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48391184)) "forced to learn RxJS's way-of-doing-things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999195))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [jQuery](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jquery.md): 111 recommend
- [Picknplace.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/picknplace-js.md): 58 recommend
- [Alpine.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/alpine-js.md): 50 recommend
- [Effect (TypeScript library)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/effect.md): 38 recommend
- [Video.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/video-js.md): 24 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "RxJS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rxjs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).