reflex VS obelisk

FRP solutions sound very attractive. But reflex seems to be stuck on the outdated GHCJS, and I haven't been able to get it to build. The newer JS output in GHC doesn't yet have DOM support. And even if I used one of those, figuring out how to interact with a LaTeX renderer might be tricky.

I only have experience using Reflex, which I regard as the main contender for FRP UI libraries in the Haskell sphere. It's got a flashy website, but I think the documentation is a bit disorganized -- it took a long time for me to figure out how to get going with the library (you find some pieces of knowledge scattered here and there, if you look hard enough). My plan was to learn it well enough to onboard other people, but I don't think I could convince anyone who hasn't already decided that they're gonna make UIs in Haskell no matter the required effort.

Once someone has spent a bunch of time with Haskell and sees the value, they will find Nix if it makes sense. Maybe they'll want to play with https://reflex-frp.org, or they'll discover they want a better way to package 3rd-party dependencies, or they start using NixOS and want to nix all the things, etc. etc. Or, maybe they'll never find a use for it, and that's okay.

Now, I've been convinced to take another look at reflex. This quick reference seems very useful, most other resources seem to always discuss reflex-dom specifically. I'm not really interested in that.

Have a look at https://reflex-frp.org/, or https://owickstrom.github.io/gi-gtk-declarative/, they are an interesting and different way of working with UI in a non imperative way.

At present, here at Typeable we develop frontend in Haskell and use the web framework Reflex and the functional reactive programming (FRP). The source code in Haskell is transpiled into the JavaScript code using GHCJS.

Reflex is the framework that allows creating reactive web applications in Haskell.

Also you’re the Haskell guy no? Found this while reading a Wikipedia article

Hi there! My name is Nikita. At Typeable, we develop frontend for some of our projects using the FRP approach, specifically, its Haskell implementation – reflex web-framework. The resources that offer guidelines for this framework are quite limited, so we decided to fill this gap more or less.

Regarding smartphone applications, I've recently been working on a simple application with Obelisk (https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk), which uses GHCJS and is pretty usable once you've gotten into Reflex a bit, though it produces somewhat opaque type errors sometimes. I do not know though whether Obelisk can do anything beyond webview apps. If so, I do not know how yet.

You can make all those things in haskell, and I do professionally. Frontends (entirely in haskell), native IOS and Android applications, Servers, and Games. In fact the framework Obelisk does most of these all out of the box.

From researching seems like Obelisk might be the right tool for this, but wanted to know if others had built mobile apps in Haskell and their experience/advice if this is a good root to take?

Thanks for the comment! We can honestly say that Obelisk is far from perfect, but we're continuously improving the project in our daily basics. And that's why we encourage you to start your adventure with the lib anew. If you still miss a guide to routing with Obelisk, please read this doc. Our team would be happy to answer your further question regarding Obelisk; feel free to email us anytime!

Thank you for your feedback; by writing this post, we wanted to familiarize the audience with using Haskell language as a universal, full-stack language. If you are interested in diving into more technical details, a good starting point would be to take a look at the Obelisk's codebase.

I also had a use case where I needed to extract the nix derivation dependencies of haskell packages: https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk/pull/933

There's also GHCJS, with https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk being (probably) the best choice, but personally I found it extremely tedious to set up a dev environment (not a nix guy) and there's also the learning curve of FRP.

https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk, https://shpadoinkle.org/

I can't speak to the nicest way, as I haven't actually developed any Android apps with Haskell, but I've been meaning to give Obelisk a try.