helix VS uix

In short, performance, easier interop with JS react libraries, better static analysis, and being able to use modern React features. For more details, see https://github.com/lilactown/helix/blob/master/docs/motivation.md and https://github.com/lilactown/helix/blob/master/docs/faq.md#what-about-hiccup. It's also worth checking this blog post: https://fbeyer.com/posts/refx-origins/

You can ignore the malli/react-hook-form part - the relevant parts are the entry namespace and the shadow-cljs config. This example uses https://github.com/lilactown/helix (great tutorial here https://github.com/iwrotesomecode/react-docs-helix) but you can use reagent if you wish. I think this should meet your requirements. You can inline your data in the cljs bundle as data and add UI via react components.

[1] https://github.com/lilactown/helix [2] https://github.com/ferdinand-beyer/refx

> But Reagent supports functional components as well, with hooks and all.

I addressed this already: while reagent is able to emit function components, there is a performance penalty to this.[1]

> I also very much like Hiccup, and so do many of us, because code is data and data is code, and Helix has decided not to support that.

Hiccup is convenient to write, but it is a constant run-time cost and a significant storage cost given that you have to store long series of constructors to cljs.core.PersistentVector in your bundle, have the JS runtime actually construct the vector, then pass it through a Hiccup interpreter to finally produce DOM nodes and throw away the persistent vector, only to repeat this entire process again on re-render.[2]

> Helix has decided not to support that.

That is simply not true. From the Helix documentation[2],

> If you want to use libraries like sablono, hicada or even hx hiccup parser, you can easily add that by creating a custom macro.

These are all Hiccup interpreters you can readily use.

IME there is very little difference between using the $ macro in Helix and writing Hiccup. I do not really miss Hiccup when I use Helix, and you still have data as code ;)

While this is from an unrelated project, there are benchmarks[3] done against Reagent that demonstrate the sheer overhead it has. In practice it is not a big problem if you rarely trigger a re-render, but otherwise it is a non-trivial cost, and if you want to use modern React features (like Suspense), there is a lot of r/as-element mingling going on, converting cases, etc. that simply make Reagent feel more tedious to use than Helix.

Also, the newer UIx2, which largely borrows from Helix, is "3.2x faster than Reagent" according to one of the contributors.[4]

I think it'd be worthwhile to benchmark all of these libraries against each other and record the data in one place. Maybe I'll get around to doing it this weekend :)

---

[1] https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/blob/master/doc/R...

[2] https://github.com/lilactown/helix/blob/master/docs/faq.md#w...

[3] https://github.com/roman01la/uix#benchmarks

[4] https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/pull/12

Helix is also worth checking our for lightweight React integration and hooks support.

Helix is a thinner library with access to hooks, if you want them.

helix

You mentioned liking React hooks, would helix be more to your liking?

Keechma/next is integrated directly with React through the hooks system (and using the excellent Helix library. You can find the integration code in the Keechma/next toolbox - especially https://github.com/keechma/keechma-next-toolbox/blob/master/src/keechma/next/helix/core.cljs

Check out uix too: https://github.com/pitch-io/uix

…it’s a reagent alternative for modern react.

> But Reagent supports functional components as well, with hooks and all.

I addressed this already: while reagent is able to emit function components, there is a performance penalty to this.[1]

> I also very much like Hiccup, and so do many of us, because code is data and data is code, and Helix has decided not to support that.

Hiccup is convenient to write, but it is a constant run-time cost and a significant storage cost given that you have to store long series of constructors to cljs.core.PersistentVector in your bundle, have the JS runtime actually construct the vector, then pass it through a Hiccup interpreter to finally produce DOM nodes and throw away the persistent vector, only to repeat this entire process again on re-render.[2]

> Helix has decided not to support that.

That is simply not true. From the Helix documentation[2],

> If you want to use libraries like sablono, hicada or even hx hiccup parser, you can easily add that by creating a custom macro.

These are all Hiccup interpreters you can readily use.

IME there is very little difference between using the $ macro in Helix and writing Hiccup. I do not really miss Hiccup when I use Helix, and you still have data as code ;)

While this is from an unrelated project, there are benchmarks[3] done against Reagent that demonstrate the sheer overhead it has. In practice it is not a big problem if you rarely trigger a re-render, but otherwise it is a non-trivial cost, and if you want to use modern React features (like Suspense), there is a lot of r/as-element mingling going on, converting cases, etc. that simply make Reagent feel more tedious to use than Helix.

Also, the newer UIx2, which largely borrows from Helix, is "3.2x faster than Reagent" according to one of the contributors.[4]

I think it'd be worthwhile to benchmark all of these libraries against each other and record the data in one place. Maybe I'll get around to doing it this weekend :)

---

[1] https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/blob/master/doc/R...

[2] https://github.com/lilactown/helix/blob/master/docs/faq.md#w...

[3] https://github.com/roman01la/uix#benchmarks

[4] https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/pull/12

If your heart’s set on following React latest closely though, UIx2 seems like a great library, and has a migration path from reagent: https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/blob/master/docs/interop-with-reagent.md

It's been a while since I posted updates on UIx, but here it is, v0.8.1 with API compatibility for React v18.2.0 https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

I suppose one of the best usecases of code sharing is to do Hydrating Server-Side-Rendered web apps just like Next.js. Not too many other languages are capable of doing this outside of Node and Clojure. For this reason it's kind of surprising that it's not more common in Clojure, seems like most people are just building old fashioned SPA's in Reagent/Reframe rather than competing with Next, but pitch's UIX library does seem to support it https://github.com/pitch-io/uix

When I was looking into ClojureScript I was kind of concerned at the complexity of writing applications in ReFrame which seems to be what most of the community seems to be using. I've developed apps in this kind of event-emitting/event handler style before in JavaScript and found it quickly got quite out of hand. For my next app I will want to go with something like React-Query that in a sort of declarative way handles all your data fetching for you, and lets you decouple your components from the getting ahold of the data they depend on. I also searched far and wide for some kind of framework/library that supports SSR+CSR like Next.js but I don't think there's anything ready yet except maybe https://github.com/pitch-io/uix.

Might want to check out Uix2 by pitch.io here https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/blob/master/docs/server-side-rendering.md Also there's https://inertiajs.com/ which is pretty interesting and has a 3rd party adapter for clojure https://inertiajs.com/community-adapters

I was starting greenfield I would consider looking further afield, maybe to UIx²