Absolutely you can. Every Effect program has to be run via some call to a ‘runX()’ function that accepts your Effect program. And the call-site where you run it is the boundary of your Effect program so you can make your app as much or as little Effect as you want.
It’s wild how easy it is to build robust systems with Effect.
I’m working on a little social media web app and it has been so incredibly simple to build the API and a background worker process with Effect. I get logging, telemetry, error handling, concurrency, API doc generation, and more for free!
I think this library gets somewhat maligned for being complex, which I don’t think is fair for how much it offers given how much more complex a an equivalent solution would be without Effect.
With v4, I also don’t feel like I am even having to wrestle with TypeScript’s type system at all. I define some basic interfaces for my services and schemas for my data models and everything is just inferred through usage for the most part. It honestly starts to feel like I’m writing JavaScript for the most part.
This library gets lots of comparisons to functional programming languages/libraries, which is fair, but I think someone working in .NET/C# would be feel right at home.
To me this feels like true innovation in the space compared to other popular frameworks’ handling of async. In other frameworks it feels bolted on and with several gotchas; here it feels that it’s actually part of the framework. The new primitives are intuitive and they compose well, resulting in async-aware UI code that is more declarative. You get so many behaviors that you would have to manually account for in other frameworks for free.
What’s also interesting to me is that it seems like it’s colorless. Your async state is used just like any other synchronous signal state.
