Electric Clojure – a reactive DSL for full-stack web development, with compiler-managed frontend/backend network sync

com.hyperfiddle/electric {:mvn/version "v2-alpha-540-ga4699532"} · 2024 Jan 10 · Changelog

Note

Electric v3 is nearly here! Request early access here: https://www.hyperfiddle.net/early-access.html

Electric is a reactive and network-aware Clojure/Script DSL that fully abstracts over client/server state sync at the programming language layer, in order to achieve strong composition across the frontend/backend boundary in dynamic web apps. With Electric, backend expressions (i.e. queries) and frontend expressions (i.e. views) compose directly. There is no incidental network divide. The Electric macros will, at compile time, perform deep graph analysis of your hollistic program's data flow in order to transparently partition and distribute it across the client/server distributed system. There is no client/server dichotomy from the programmer's perspective. All IO and effects are managed.

Figure: This is not RPC or client-side ORM. The Electric compiler performs deep graph analysis of your unified frontend/backend program to automatically determine the optimal network cut, and then compile it into separate client and server target programs that cooperate and anticipate each other's needs.

• Fully reactive: unlike javascript frameworks, in Electric, reactivity is built directly into the programming language itself. Reactive-if, reactive-for, reactive try/catch. When everything is reactive, it feels like nothing is reactive. No observables! No async types! De-load your mind and relax.

• Multi-tier: frontend and backend are defined in the same expression, same function, same file. It's not code sharing, it's code splitting. Let the compiler infer the boundary from your code, instead of contorting your code — nay, your entire architecture — to fit the boundary.

• Network-transparent: Electric closures close over server and client scope bindings, all in the same expression. The Electric compiler uses compile-time static knowledge of your source code to slice your expressions into client and server portions. Right through closures, loops and deeply nested function calls.

• Strong composition: Network-transparent Electric functions are true functions. You have lambda, recursion, HOFs, closures, dynamic scope, macros, etc: the full undamaged composition power of Lisp. Goodbye "functional core imperative shell"; with Electric the entire system is a function.

Our mission is to raise the abstraction ceiling in web development in the same way that managed memory did in the 90s, paving the way for something new.

Hype quotes

• "The amount of code I don't need to write is staggering"
• "Actually insane, manually shuttling data between client/server is going to look antiquated real soon"
• "My god this was easy to write! When you change something, it's just there. The progress I made was ... WOW. And how fast!"
• "Electric is extraordinary... an entire class of problems have just GONE AWAY with Electric"
• "Electric lets me do the actual thing I want to do; with everything else I have to do all this stuff that's not even the thing"
• "I can't imagine building this UI without electric, it would have been so messy"
• "Pretty new to Electric ... the low LOC for expressing ideas [in Electric] is mind-boggling"
• "I'm on project three with Electric and have never had so much fun and productivity building web apps"
• "I’ve gone from I can’t build that.. to building a large chunk of functionality in a day with Electric"
• "This is a paradigm shift similar to garbage collection"
• "The approach is a breath of fresh air in what appears like a stagnating swamp"
• "Truly 10x, 100x piece of tech"
• "I think you're the first to really break through the cruft and propose a real solution to millions of hours of wasted JavaScript programming"

Tutorial and live examples

• Live Tutorial: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/
• electric starter app – minimalist entrypoint

Documentation

• Talk: Electric Clojure v3: Differential Dataflow for UI (Getz 2024)
• Talk: Electric Clojure: compiler managed datasync for rich web apps (Getz 2023)
• Talk: UIs are streaming DAGs (Getz 2022)
• Talk: Missionary: a functional approach to massively concurrent application design (Noel 2023)
• You don't need a web framework, you need a web language (Getz 2021)
• Talk: Functional effects and streaming systems in Clojure (Noel 2021)
• https://clojureverse.org/t/electric-clojure-a-signals-dsl-for-fullstack-web-ui/9788
• https://clojureverse.org/t/signals-vs-streams/9840/1

Community

• Support chatroom: #hyperfiddle @ clojurians.net
• follow https://twitter.com/dustingetz for progress updates
• Contributing: PRs require a signed contributors agreement (like Clojure), DM dustingetz on slack. No typo fixes please.

References

Electric Clojure implements a form of arrowized continuous time dataflow programming with extensions for network-transparent function composition.

• The Essence of Dataflow Programming (2006) – great category theory overview of dataflow programming
• Push-pull functional reactive programming, Elliot (2009)
• Breaking down FRP, Jane Street (2014)
• Seven Implementations of Incremental (video), Jane Street, 2016