neil VS uix

So neil has a bunch of other features like project scaffolding, building, testing, adding license, etc. I really recommend you take a deep look at the repository and learn all the automatized possibilities that neil adds to your project.

Check out neil. It makes creating new deps.edn-based projects easy. It also has commands to add deps incrementally to your deps.edn with neil dep add and helps you tag new releases with neil version. You can run it in a REPL if you want, but as you can see below, it runs pretty fast in the shell. $ brew install babashka/brew/neil $ time neil new scratch play Creating project from org.corfield.new/scratch in play neil new scratch play 0.09s user 0.06s system 54% cpu 0.280 total

Full-featured test runner: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha

If you install neil (https://github.com/babashka/neil), you can do `neil add test` which will automatically set up cognitect-labs/test-runner in your project. Then you can run tests with `neil test` (just an alias, you don't have to use it).

> I used Kit to bootstrap this project and the way it set up tests doesn't even work, but this was what most people recommended to me for starting a Clojure project

I don't really like the approach that Kit takes and prefer something more opinionated like Biff. I'd love to hear your feedback if you do end up trying out Biff.

For some common tasks, neil is also an option.

Let's setup a basic project that includes a logger. I think the nicest way to get a new project up is with one of the tools that Borkdude has created, called neil. If you have this installed, just run the following in an empty directory:

When I see legit anger and frustration in these comments, I also think about the newcomers who might be turned off by the funky syntax just to generate a template. That said, my solution to this wasn't to add another complaint to the thread, but to add the neil new command to solve this problem for tools.deps going forward.

There is also neil which offers some features to make working with deps.edn a little easier.

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 :)

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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

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