[barrell]

I’ve been a ClojureScript developer for many years, and we (as a community) have had the pleasure of the reagent library. From the early days of react, it was basically a signals-like library with an ergonomic api. Signals are almost a requirement in ClojureScript, assume you want to do any sort of REPL-based workflows.

In the time that I’ve been using ClojureScript, the whole react community has switched to hooks. I find it so baffling - requiring your entire data structure to be contained within your component lifecycle? The thousands of calls to individual “useState” to track the same number of state items? The fact that every function is closing over historical state unless you manually tell it to change every time the variable does — and then this last bit in combination with non-linear deep equality comparisons?

I recently have been in the process of switching phrasing.app from reagent atoms to preact/signals for performance reasons (and as part of a longer horizon move from react to preact) and I have to say it’s been fantastic. Maybe 50 lines of code to replicate reagent atoms with preact/signals, all the benefits, and much much faster.

Very happy that there is react-like library so devoted to first class support of signals.