helix VS ripley

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 :)

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[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

Not disagreeing, and it's only one aspect of Phoenix, but it might be of interest to someone reading that this LiveView-like Clojure library exists: https://github.com/tatut/ripley

Also this is a neat list of LiveView-like technologies across various languages: https://github.com/liveviews/liveviews

Ripley seems interesting: https://github.com/tatut/ripley https://dev.solita.fi/2020/06/01/rethinking-the-frontend.html

Maybe it's because Clojure has typically attracted a demographic who are more shy about self-promoting and marketing their new ideas and tools. Photon is an exciting (and relevant) example defying that trend though: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags

Also relevant as a Phoenix-like alternative for Clojure: https://github.com/tatut/ripley

I haven't seen https://github.com/tatut/ripley mentioned. Seems cool.

Thanks for the refs! There’s also a recent CLJS attempt at this. And a good thread about trade-offs of this approach.