Can anyone comment on how Cycle.js compares to other frontend FRP frameworks like ClojureScript's re-frame[1]?
[1]: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Cycle.js – A functional and reactive JavaScript framework for predictable codeday8
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.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
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, 12:45:45 PM 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 sourcesSyndicate seems very cool! Do you know if it's used by anyone or is it more of a research project at this stage? Am I right that the pattern seems very similar to re-frame [0] in Clojurescript? It seems like it might be an excellent way to develop web apps, especially since I see there's a javascript version as well.
[0] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Actors for Squeak SmalltalkJust so you know, you have a name collision with a popular ClojureScript SPA library, re-frame: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Show HN: Ghuser.io – Complete GitHub profilesThe re-frame effects in ClojureScript are a similar idea https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/blob/master/docs/Effects.md
In The Elm ArchitectureRe-Frame: A Reagent Framework for Writing SPAs, in ClojureScript
2 points · Open discussionI mention this is pretty much any thread talking about frontend framework architectures. Check out ClojureScript's re-frame project. It's maybe not for everyone but in my opinion it's an elegant and distilled method for writing React-esque views and handling data subscriptions. The syntax is of course polarizing but it really gets rid of a lot of boilerplate.
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In Vue.js: the good, the meh, and the uglyRe-frame for clojurescript. Worth reading even if you're not using cljs but are involved in front-end development.
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/blob/master/docs/README.md
In Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?Om isn't so much a take on React as it is a take on the state management layer and it uses React under the covers. I believe it's been largely superseded by re-frame [1], which follows the Redux / TEA model. There is an Om Next and that's basically a take on Falcor / Relay using the Datomic pull syntax but I haven't heard that much about it outside the talks where he was announcing it.
[1] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/
In ReasonML – React as first intendedThere are a couple Clojurescript interfaces to React: Om (https://github.com/omcljs/om) and Reagent (https://reagent-project.github.io/) are two I'm familiar with.
For an example of how a Clojurescript project would be built using these libraries, I'd recommend checking out re-frame: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
In My struggle to learn ReactA nice thing about Lisp is you can do whatever without much getting in your way -- though this is a pretty common way of doing HTML for get-it-out-the-door work. You can get a whole lot fancier (https://github.com/Day8/re-frame is an example from ClojureScript land). But the context of what you're making determines the important variations, and whether you ever let a designer (or a programmer) touch this example at this level of resolution or something approximately the same like a separated out HTML file (or whatever template system you like) that the Lisp function just wraps. Example details that could be important in general, not just for this specific code repo:
This thing has no concept of localization, is that a constraint? Accessibility? Are there dozens of other engineers working at this level of detail you need to worry about? Is
Read the rest
this the output of a higher level tool used by either coders or designers? Is there a coherent component architecture behind this or is it just more of a utility function someone made? Do components need to be namespaced? Live in their own files/packages? Is the thing you're building a site with several unique pages or a SPA? Where are the JavaScript implementation points for things like the on-click's register() function? Or are you going to forbid JS in your markup (because it confuses designers, or because of CSP policy) and force programmers to bind things elsewhere? How does your routing system work, is it fine to hardcode those paths like that?
Not formal verification, but you can specify and validate application state of SPAs written in clojurescript using clojure.spec(https://clojure.org/about/spec).
Example -- (https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/blob/master/examples/todomv...)
In Modeling Redux with TLA+Clojure(script) with re-frame, using the luminus template.
https://github.com/Day8/re-frame
http://www.luminusweb.net/
edit: Should probably say why...
- Clojure and clojurescript give nearly identical experiences on the front and back end, with the ability to actually share some code between the two.
- Clojure is dynamic and spec gives some really awesome validation and generative test capabilities
- There is a lot of fuss around javascript frameworks and dealing with html / css build tools and their arbitrary syntax. Clojure front end frameworks provide tools that make templating html look just like regular data structures in clojure, styles too. With stylefy you can also keep all styles inline while supporting media queries. It really is a low cognitive load setup once you get going. I love it.
https://github.com/Jarzka/stylefy
edit-2:
Read the rest
More whys...
- re-frame is basically redux but easier and with less boilerplate. I use it for small and large projects.
- Pure immutable functions are such a game changer. Even poorly written projects with tons of features can be reasoned about and broken down for long term maintenance if the language supports immutability and pure functions. Re-frame really plays to this strength for managing state and I can't say enough good things about it. Been working with it for 2+ years and I can't imagine switching for anything else I've seen out there.