TOtosh·Oct 19, 2018Submission
DataScript (Immutable database and Datalog query engine)
1 points · Open discussiontonsky
datascript
Clojure2014–2026
tonsky / datascript
datascript
Immutable database and Datalog query engine for Clojure, ClojureScript and JS
55Distinct people
74Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Immutable database and Datalog query engine for Clojure, ClojureScript and JS
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mozilla/mentat · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- replikativ/datahike · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- metasoarous/datsync · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 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 year74 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-04-24 14:32:47 UTC to 2026-09-03 15:53:42 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 5 | 5 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 3 | 8 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources"Datalog is a declarative logic programming language that syntactically is a subset of Prolog." [1]
"Datomic is a distributed database and implementation of Datalog.". Datomic seems to be quite succesful [2].
Related to datomic, I'm trying to learn Datascript these days ("An immutable in-memory database and Datalog query engine in Clojure and ClojureScript.") [3].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
2: https://www.datomic.com/customers.html
3: https://github.com/tonsky/datascript
In The Birth of Prolog (1992) [pdf]Yes, Datomic is the killer app for Clojure [^1]. Have a look at Datascript[^2] and Mozilla's Mentat[^3], which is basically an embedded Datomic in Rust.
Hickey's Spec-ulation keynote is probably his most controversial talk, but it finally swayed me toward dynamic typing for growing large systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk
The Clojure build ecosystem is tough. Ten years ago, I could not have wrangled Clojure with my skillset - it's a stallion. We early adopters are masochists, but we endure the pain for early advantages, like a stable JavaScript target, immutable filesets and hot-reloading way before anyone else had it.
Is it worth it? Only if it pays off. I think ClojureScript and Datomic are starting to pay off, but it's not obvious for who - certainly not very ever organisation.
React Native? I tore my hair out having
Read the rest
to `rm -rf ./node-modules` every 2 hours to deal with breaking dependency issues.
Whenever I try to use something else (like Swift), I crawl back to Clojure for the small, consistent language. I don't think Clojure is the end-game, but a Lisp with truly immutable namespaces and data structures is probably in the future.
[^1]: In 2014 I wrote down "Why Clojure?" - http://petrustheron.com/posts/why-clojure.html
[^2]: https://github.com/tonsky/datascript
[^3]: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat
You can try a mostly Datomic-compatible Datascript: https://github.com/tonsky/datascript/
In Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doinghttps://www.datomic.com/get-datomic.html starter version
https://github.com/tonsky/datascript Datascript is also neat, it's an in-browser DB with datalog query syntax. There's some neat stuff possible with om.next + datascript: https://github.com/omcljs/om/wiki/DataScript-Integration-Tut...
In Datomic Cloud