Here’s the Deal

ClojureScript vs Flow

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When comparing ClojureScript vs Flow, the Slant community recommends ClojureScript for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions to "The JavaScript Problem"?” ClojureScript is ranked 4th while Flow is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose ClojureScript is:

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time.

Specs

Current stable version1.9

GZipped size32 kB

No specs yet!

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best solutions to "The JavaScript Problem"?

Pros

Pro
Live interactive programming with figwheel

Pro
Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead.

Pro
Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries.

Pro
Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece).

Pro
Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server.

Pro
Can be used with React out of the box

Pro
Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment.

Pro
Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process.

Pro
The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure:
Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure.
Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation.

Pro
Checks to see if you check for Nulls

Because getting those exceptions is just not fun and very pervasive.

Pro
Versioned type definitions

Pro
There is support in many code editors via the extension

For example, there is good support through the extension in Visual Studio Code, which is a good editor for TypeScript, which is a competitor to Flow.

Pro
Babel extension for strip of type annotations

Thanks to the Babel extension for the output, there is minimally modified code that is understandable to the author.

Pro
Statical analysing of JavaScript code

Statical analysing of JavaScript code without pre-making any changes to it. But supported annotation types by extending the syntax of the language.

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Cons

Con
Tooling is horrible

I've never seen worse tooling before. Writing tests and getting test coverage reports is near impossible. Tooling is brittle and clunky. Feels prehistoric.

Con
Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.