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Electric Clojure – full-stack differential dataflow for UI

com.hyperfiddle/electric {:mvn/version "v3-alpha-SNAPSHOT"} · 2024 Dec 11

Note

Electric v3 is now in private beta! Request beta access here: https://www.hyperfiddle.net/early-access.html

Electric is a new way to build rich, interactive web products that simply have too much interactivity, realtime streaming, and too rich network connections to be able to write all the frontend/backend network plumbing by hand. With Electric, you can compose your client and server expressions directly (i.e. in the same function), and the Electric compiler macros will infer at compile time the implied frontend/backend boundary and generate the corresponding full-stack app.

Figure: In Electric, client and server expressions compose directly, and the Electric compiler transparently solves the network boundary through a straightforward dataflow graph analysis.

How it works: Unlike request/response frameworks, frontend ORMs, and client-side databases that suffer from request waterfalls, over/under fetching, large payload deserialization and other performance issues that get worse as your codebase and database grows, Electric uses a custom Clojure/Script compiler to perform deep graph analysis of your unified frontend/backend program and automatically determine the implied network cut, and then compile your program into separate reactive client and server target programs that cooperate and anticipate each other's needs. See UIs are streaming DAGs (Getz 2022) for a quick 10 minute video explainer of how this works and why it actually doesn't result in the request waterfalls you might expect, even in the presence of deep nesting, loops and control flow.

  • Fully reactive: unlike javascript frameworks, in Electric, reactivity is built directly into the programming language itself. Reactive-if, reactive-for, reactive lambda. 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"
  • "The downside of using the Electric Clojure library is I don’t know if I can build any applications without it now"
  • "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

Electric v2 readme, docs, tutorial links: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric/tree/v2

Documentation

Community

License

  • Electric v3 is free for bootstrappers and non-commercial use via a business source available license.
  • See license change announcement.