explicitstate

Explicitstate is a concept in software engineering that refers to representing and managing a program's state directly and explicitly, rather than relying on hidden, implicit, or environment-driven state. In this approach, functions or components receive a state object as input and produce a new state as part of their output, making the state transitions visible to the programmer.

This explicit form of state handling contrasts with implicit or global state, where changes can occur without the calling code being aware of them. Explicit state supports clearer reasoning about program behavior, easier testing, and better opportunities for formal verification, since the flow of data and state changes is documented in function interfaces and return values rather than scattered through side effects.

Common contexts for explicitstate include functional programming patterns such as the State monad, where state is threaded through computations, and UI architectures that pass an immutable state object through a component tree or through event handlers. It also appears in modeling and simulation, where state transitions are defined as explicit operations on a state representation.

Benefits of explicitstate include improved predictability, easier debugging, and straightforward retries or rollbacks of state transitions. Drawbacks can include increased boilerplate, more verbose code, and potential performance considerations from copying or reconstructing state objects.

In practice, explicitstate is often used in combination with controlled mutability, state containers, or architecture patterns that balance explicit state with performance and developer ergonomics. Related concepts include implicit state, mutable state, and state management patterns such as store-based architectures.