rfcs VS helix

Examples from the conversations of that time:

> ...we want closures to capture the values we rendered with, and to keep "seeing" those values forever. That's really important for concurrent mode where a notion of current value doesn't really exist. Hooks design models a component as being in many non-clashing states at the same time, instead of switching the "current" state (which is what classes model well). People don't really need to think about these details, but they're motivating the design a lot. [0]

> In Concurrent Mode, render may run more then one time, and since this in a class is mutable, renders that should be the same may not be. [1]

[0] - https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/pull/68#issuecomment-4778866...

[1] - https://tkplaceholder.io/why-function-components-fit-react-b...

There are multiple names for this hook. You can find the documentation under the names useEvent or useEffectEvent.

-https://www.patterns.dev/ -https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/blob/main/text/0188-server-components.md -https://dev.to/this-is-learning/qwik-the-post-modern-framework-3c5o -https://dev.to/this-is-learning/astro-framework-169m -https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-on-the-web -https://web.dev/vitals/

However, in React, function components can return a ReactNode. This type includes number | string | Iterable | undefined and will likely also include Promise( in the future.

I was also hoping that useEvent would eliminate some weird dependency cases, who knows when that will actually happen (https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/pull/220).

Given a lot of unknowns on SSR and ReactEng working on RSC it feels like the wrong move to use next.js and I should just use normal react. For basic react is create react app the way to go or vite?

As mentioned before, Next.js takes a stance of treating every component as a Server Component by default. If you want to use a Client Component, you'll need to annotate the file with use client; directive at the top of the component file.

Use client is actually a React convention for what it’s worth. https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/pull/227

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