If you're that pessimistic about your front-end code becoming obsolete, I'd strongly suggest looking into ClojureScript with https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent and (if you need SPA levels of coordinated state) https://github.com/day8/re-frame
The up-front costs are certainly higher in terms of the learning curve for the average dev, but it sure beats rewriting the whole thing every few years. reagent dates back to 2013 and has been mostly unscathed by the JS ecosystem churn. I'm under the impression that some (JS-based) React devs catch on to reagent pretty quickly, so the up-front costs might not even be that high.
Fantastic article, by the way!
In Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startupsday8
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, 9:01:12 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
3 sourcesI worked with Elm for 2 (or maybe 3?) years, and with Clojurescript for another 2. I recently had to decide on which of the two I would use on my next project, and it was definitely not an easy decision. Ultimately, I went with Clojurescript.
Main Clojurescript pro was re-frame[0]. Re-frame makes state handling easy and, especially importantly for performance-sensitive projects, it entirely removes the (rather common) problem of re-renders with the way its subscriptions are handled. This, plus the ability to have your entire stack in a single (amazing) language, were the tipping points to me.
While you can't achieve the same level of compile-time safety in Clojurescript, you can apply "state checks" (with Spec or any custom validation mechanism) any time your state changes. And with re-frame, it is extremely clear when your state changes,
Read the rest
therefore you can block any invalid state from being saved and catching it as soon as it happens. Again, not the same kind of safety you have with Elm, but to me it's a good-enough trade-off.
And that's exactly what I do with my code: every time my state changes, I run a validation check on the keys that are about to change. If their value is deemed invalid, an error popup (identical to old Windows XP error popups, because why not) will appear, stating what the invalid state is and what it should be like instead, as well as which event led to this state in the first place. This check is so fast I don't even need to disable it in the production build (but instead of a popup we get a notification that an invalid state error happened).
In fact, there's this (non-mainstream) argument that runtime checks bring even more power over typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqY4nUMfus8
TL;DR: Not an easy decision, but the truth is whichever one you pick, it will be a great choice.
[0] - https://github.com/day8/re-frame/
Very interesting take from re-frame's author regarding React Hooks (and why it ultimately doesn't matter that hook-based components are not very popular on CLJS): https://github.com/day8/re-frame/issues/590#issuecomment-624...
In ClojureScript 1.10.844