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day8
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
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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

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.

01020302015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 28 mentions; 5 submissions, 23 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 4 submissions, 7 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 2 submissions, 13 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 4 submissions, 11 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC28523
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1147
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15213
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15411
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

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 GitHub

What Hacker News says

3 sources
The Clojure's approach is to favour libraries over frameworks. We use Clojure on various style of applications (mainly web and API based), hosted on widespread infrastructure technologies of Cloud Providers (Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc.) and it's a breeze: here are our reasons for choosing Clojure https://defsquare.com/blog/why-we-bet-on-clojure If you want to look at libraries where some people have settled, here are our _opinionated_ takes on libraries that we use on almost every project: - HTTP: Ring is the de facto way to manage HTTP request (see https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Concepts) supplemented with various "Middlewares" for web-related concerns (security, logging, content encoding, etc. see https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Standard-middlewar...). Jetty and Aleph are common web servers (and https://gith
Read the rest
ub.com/clj-commons/aleph) that implement Ring interface. - Routing: Reitit (https://github.com/metosin/reitit) - Single-Page App: shadow-cljs for the build concerns (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs), Reagent with Re-frame for complex/large app (https://reagent-project.github.io and https://github.com/day8/re-frame). Even if we now prefer using HTMX (https://htmx.org) and server-side rendering (Hiccup way of manipulating HTML is just amazing, https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup). - Schema management: Malli (https://github.com/metosin/malli) - Lifecycle management: Mount, Integrant or Component (https://github.com/tolitius/mount https://github.com/weavejester/integrant and https://github.com/stuartsierra/component) - Config management: Aero (https://github.com/juxt/aero) and environ (https://github.com/weavejester/environ) - Log: μ/log (https://github.com/BrunoBonacci/mulog) - Time: https://github.com/juxt/tick - Testing: https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.test-api.html and Kaocha for the runner (https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha). - Package and project management: tools.deps is simple and powerful (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) For infrastructure stuff (PostgreSQL, Keycloak, Solr, Kafka, etc.), just wrapping the underlying Java library or driver is often enough, and there are lots of wrappers for easing the integration. And we implement Hexagonal architecture style to put all of that in place. Don't be afraid a libraries not moving a lot recently, it's a sign that the library is mature and battle-tested. Clojure is a joy to use every day :)
In A History of Clojure (2020) [pdf]
I have not seen a better client state management than re-frame. https://github.com/day8/re-frame Notably the author of re-frame has been weary of hooks. I think that’s for a good reason. The approach in re frame feels like the best way to manage state so far for a react based app. Everything that changes state flows through an event. State can only be observed through subscriptions. Side effects are isolated to their own type of event. Debugging and testing are so straight forward with these concepts. Redux got close but it has two problems in my mind. Like hooks, it encapsulates for no good reason. Put the state in one thing that you can observe holistically before and after pure events. It also has too much boiler plate.
In Were React hooks a mistake?

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