ClojureScript's re-frame[0] is my favorite way to React, honestly. PureScript's halogen is also pretty nice. Re-frame has a built-in, functionally pure way to do ajax and side-effects, too, which comes in pretty handy.
[0] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Simple React Patternsday8
re-frame
Clojure2015–2025
day8 / re-frame
re-frame
A ClojureScript framework for building user interfaces, leveraging React
61Distinct people
102Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
5.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A ClojureScript framework for building user interfaces, leveraging React
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
ClojureScript's re-frame[0] is my favorite way to React, honestly. PureScript's halogen is also pretty nice. Re-frame has a built-in, functionally pure way to do ajax and…
christophilus used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
- day8/re-frame-template · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- reagent-project/reagent · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- thheller/shadow-cljs · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:02:44 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year102 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-02-23 09:22:35 UTC to 2025-07-06 17:09:08 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 28 | 5 | 23 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 4 | 7 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 2 | 13 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 4 | 11 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 0 | 11 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Derived Values, Flowing
This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course,
sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the
metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation ... but is this not the nine hundred-year-old
axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe,
y'know. Pretty good.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
reflecting on identity, flow and derived values (aka The Ship of Theseus)
Overview
re-frame is a ClojureScript framework for building user interfaces.
It has a data-oriented, functional design. Its primary focus is on high programmer productivity and scaling up to larger Single-Page applications.
Developed in late 2014, and released in 2015, it is mature and stable. It is used by both small startups and companies with over 500 developers, and it has delivered into production applications which are 40K lines of code and beyond.
Across the last 10 years, it has outlasted multiple generations of Javascript churn - just imagine your team's productivity if you didn't have to contend with technical churn, and have new magic burn your fingers every two years. Brand new, exciting concepts like recoiljs (in the React world), have been a regular part of re-frame from the beginning.
re-frame is lucky enough to enjoy an unfair advantage - ClojureScript is a Lisp. Alan Kay
once described Lisp as "Maxwell's equations of software". Paul Graham
described how Lisp was a competitive advantage for his startup. When we use Lisp, we
get to leverage 50 years of foliated excellence from the very best minds available.
And then there's also a thriving ClojureScript community which delivers modern ideas and best-in-class tooling.
Although re-frame leverages React (via Reagent), it only needs
React to be the V in MVC, and no more. re-frame takes a different road to the currently-pervasive idea that Views should be causal (colocated queries, ComponentDidMount, hooks, etc).
In re-frame, events are causal, and views are purely reactive.
Documentation
The re-frame documentation is available here.
Programmatic Diagnostics (1.4.6+)
The documentation includes a
Debugging & Instrumentation
guide for devtools and diagnostic code: source-meta macros, trace tag
schema validation, per-dispatch epoch callbacks, dry-run dispatch with
effect overrides, and subscription cache lookups.
Source-meta opt-in
re-frame.core is the stable function API — reg-event-db /
reg-event-fx / reg-event-ctx / reg-sub / reg-fx and the
dispatch / subscribe family are defns, so (map reg-event-db ...), (apply reg-sub ...), (partial reg-fx ...) work as
written.
For call-site {:file :line} metadata in dev / devtools, alias
re-frame.macros instead. Same call shape, source-meta captured at
expansion time and DCE'd in production CLJS:
;; function API — no source-meta
(:require [re-frame.core :as rf])
;; macro API — same call shape, source-meta captured
(:require [re-frame.macros :as rf])
The Current Version
For full dependency information, see the Clojars page
Getting Help
Licence
re-frame is MIT licenced
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
15 sourcesCheck out Re-Frame and Reagent, that's the only UI programming framework I've actually enjoyed. Both are in ClojureScript.
Re-Frame: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
Reagent: https://reagent-project.github.io/
In A Closer Look at Swift Playgrounds for iPadNo direct knowledge of elm, here's what the framework author had to say (briefly) on the topic: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame#why-should-you-care
In The Re-Frame Guide: Front-End Architecture in ClojureVue and React both seem a little too heavy in boilerplate. It's also interesting that Vue seems to think that mutable state is a good thing (well, vanilla React does have mutable state too...).
For the boilerplate (and large bundle size!) problem we have http://markojs.com that looks very interesting.
However, I think what we really might want is something closer to ClojureScript's re-frame (https://github.com/Day8/re-frame) and Reagent. However, Clojure and it's tools aren't really that great for beginners/juniors and/or people with little experience in FP and lisps.
Maybe in the near future we'll see a little bit more FP style JS solutions pop up?
In Switching From React To Vue.jsWhen talking about reagent, we should also mention re-frame: A Reagent Framework For Writing SPAs, in Clojurescript.
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
It provides a fantastic framework for implementing browser based UIs with a very clean approach, inspired by Elm architecture, and related to redux.
In Reagent: Minimalistic React for ClojureScriptYou might also like this: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
It's not js/es6 (re-frame is a react-based redux-like framework for clojurescript) but the author does a good job at explaining how reactive programming go well with functionnal programming and immutability.
In TypeScript at SlackAs no one else has mentioned him yet: Mike Thompson, creator of re-frame (ClojureScript).
There are not many ways to follow him (mostly GH [1]), he hardly uses his Twitter [2]. Maybe that's why he's so productive?
The constantly evolving re-frame docs [3] are all you need to follow..
[1] https://github.com/mike-thompson-day8
[2] https://twitter.com/wazound
[3] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?If you want it to feel more like backend development, give clojurescript a whirl.
Best way to do that is start with this template:
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame-template
Which is based on this library:
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
ClojureScript is fantastic. Being immutable as a baseline makes it work so much better in the React world of things. That said, if you haven't used any Lisps it can be a bit intimidating (for me it still is, a bit), but you get to the point fairly quickly where things can be both daunting and productive at the same time.
If you prefer to stick with more raw JS, I recommend React without a data-framework until you find you need one. Raw react components are plenty to get you started.
In Element – A Vue 2.0-based component library for developers, designers and PMsCheck out re-frame [1], too. It's a very thin layer on top of Reagent, but it will help you to get the overall structure just right.
Also, its README is worth reading even if you won't use re-frame :)
[1]: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In ClojureScript is the most-used functional language that compiles to JavaScriptIt depends on what you mean by component. Reagent components (ie UI widgets), I agree. Components should be self-contained and as re-frame agnostic as possible. So instead of subscribing to the data they want, they could take in a ratom as an argument (because the subscribe function returns one anyway).
But if the component is larger (that is, not just the view, but also the handlers and subscriptions -- I'd probably call it something else, a service maybe...) then its a bit less simple because not just the view, but also the handlers and subscriptions need to be aware of the "instance" they are running. There's no well defined re-frame solution for this yet.
My favourite solution right now is to have each instance have its own ID as explained here: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/issues/264#issuecomment-260...
That is, by convention, su
Read the rest
bscriptions are always [query-name instance-id <other optional data>] and messages are always [message-type instance-id <other optional data>] by convention. This way works quite well, but has the downside that it is by convention and there's no guarantee that other code will do it the same way.
Re-Frame: a Reagent Framework for Writing SPAs, in ClojureScript
146 points · Open discussionEasiest win for me was trying out re-frame[1]. Not only do you get the best performance out of react, to the point where the actual virtual-dom implementation doesn't matter, but you also gain productivity and since it forces you to build apps made out of 95% pure functions and immutable data, reasoning even at scale is still incredibly easier than anything else I've ever tried to build GUIs with.
[1]: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using ReactAs a very nice complement to reagent, I'd also like to mention re-frame: A Reagent Framework For Writing SPAs, in Clojurescript.
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In A deep dive into ClojureScript reagent