KAkaliszad·Dec 2, 2021
We are using shadow-cljs https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs and that integrates with npm just fine. It doesn't get much easier than that I guess and if you have trouble, you can contact Thomas Heller or other people on the Clojurians Slack-channel.
If I did any app or system, that could be written in Java or JavaScript (browser or Node.js) I would take Clojure or ClojureScript any day. I don't know how to match the comfort and power in a different language. If it turned out e.g. by using a profiler, I just need way better performance in some bottlenecks and after I have exhausted all options that a) a better algorithm b) better technology/ different approach such as Canvas/ WebGL you name it in addition to what Clojure(Script) performance features offer, I would perhaps consider learning to write a module in Rust/ WebAssembly or just
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use a bit more resources (if this was e.g. a money problem).
Besides embedded, really high-performance stuff, some parts of the infrastructure that need to be as efficient as possible or run without GC or need to talk to very special interfaces or a library, Clojure and ClojureScript or related dialects/ implementations are suited for pretty much everything else I can think of.
We should be thinking about how to implement a Clojure-like language in more places, perhaps even without a GC but with AOT compilation + interpreter for the REPL along the way of Babashka. We should explore how to have a REPL to multiple systems at once and handle them like it was a single machine to some degree. We should be thinking, how to make a running Clojure program interruptible easily (perhaps with an extra setting), like it was a program in the shell. We should think about adding a Clojure-like language to the browser natively so that programs don't have to load it like they do now and that a browser tab could have some kind of REPL that you could authenticate and connect to over a socket. That way, you could rewrite the code of the web app at runtime if allowed by the user.
And we definitely should design more APIs in much simpler way working more with data and less with invoking some specific functions. E.g. browser "history" could just be a vector/ array of maps/ objects or whatever instead of some finicky getters and setters that obscure the problem and are just another thing you have to learn to do useful work.