> I want the decisions I make to last decades, not just a few years. I don't think that's a sentiment appreciated by most, though.
Clojure and ClojureScript very much appreciate that sentiment. re-frame, a library for creating React apps with ClojureScript is rock solid, many years old, and still on version 1, meaning no breaking changes so far. 5 years old re-frame code still looks the same today.
I use re-frame, but you cannot deny that class components being deprecated is going to be pure trouble for re-frame. Re-frame relies on the reagent library's Reaction interface. While re-frame does not depend on anything else in the reagent library, it is natural to use Reagent for your rendering. But reagent itself emits class components by default, since it predated hooks by several years.
Now that class components are essentially deprecated in the documentation, and the fact that React 18 support is still an experimental feature in Reagent, people using ClojureScript and React today are in quite some trouble, especially since React is the only JS framework I know of that is compatible with functional programming.
While reagent is able to emit function components, there is a performance penalty to this, since it employs some hacks in order to be compatible with both hooks and ratoms. Thankfully there are some projects that are attempting to bring modern React[1] and even bring the whole re-frame API alongside it.[2]
Last weekend I decided to try out helix, refx, reitit, and shadow-cljs' lazy-loaded modules and managed to make a pretty nice demo app that uses essentially the re-frame API but it's all modern React and hooks, and the router was capable of lazily loading modules containing code of pages the user wanted to navigate to.
But Reagent supports functional components as well, with hooks and all. I don't see why I'd have to change an entire library because class components are being retired. 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.
> 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: "If you want to use libraries like sablono, hicada or even hx hiccup parser, you can easily add that by creating a custom macro"[2]. 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, the data is in a macro but that macro itself returns 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 :)
Clojure and ClojureScript very much appreciate that sentiment. re-frame, a library for creating React apps with ClojureScript is rock solid, many years old, and still on version 1, meaning no breaking changes so far. 5 years old re-frame code still looks the same today.