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Add to SafariWhen comparing PostCSS vs Garden (Clojure), the Slant community recommends PostCSS for most people. In the question“What are the best CSS preprocessors/postprocessors?” PostCSS is ranked 4th while Garden (Clojure) is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose PostCSS is:
PostCSS is 3-30 times faster than Sass (including libsass), Less, and Stylus
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast
PostCSS is 3-30 times faster than Sass (including libsass), Less, and Stylus
Pro Flexible
PostCSS allows you to opt-in to the features you need with plugins. This allows you to set it up to behave exactly like Sass, with nesting, mixing, extends, and more. On the other hand, it allows you to use plugins by themselves for things like auto-prefixing, minification, and more. You can even set up your own custom "stack" of plugins to do exactly what you like.
Pro Doesn't force designers to learn a new syntax
Rather than learn a different syntax, PostCSS allows you to write in pure CSS.
Pro JavaScript-based out of the box
Since it's basically CSS extended through JavaScript it works in the browser directly without the need to compile it beforehand.
Pro Style webpages with a full programming language
With Garden, you have access to all the core features of a powerful programming language to build your scripts, including functions, variables, namespaces, and data manipulation like map merging or concatenation.
Pro Full-stack Clojure with ClojureScript for front-end + Clojure for backend
Garden finishes the full Clojure stack experience — you can have the entire codebase in a single language with ClojureScript on the front-end, Clojure on the backend, and Garden for CSS.
Pro Hot loading
Using the core Garden auto loader or the excellent Garden Gnome plugin, watch your style changes take effect in the browser as soon as you save the code — no reload required.
Pro Styles as data-nesting are obvious
Clojure is a data-oriented programming language with strong emphasis on simple, clear inline data structures. Garden models styles using these same structures, making the cascade visually obvious.
Pro Clean syntax
Other options listed include various pain-points like use of @ symbols or too much cruft; because Garden is just Clojure, and Clojure is a very well-designed language aimed to emphasize simplicity and positive developer experience (without semantic whitespace problems), you have the full benefit of a well-designed and general-purpose syntax.
Pro CSS-engine accessible from front-end
Because Garden is also Clojurescript friendly, this means that you can dynamically effect styles based on app state.
Cons
Con Harder to install and keep working
The immense flexibility of PostCSS plus its current rapid evolution makes it harder to install, configure and keep running than the more monolithic and mature preprocessors.
Con Outdatet, plugins are often based on different postcss versions and don't work together properly
Con Some plugins need to run in a certain order
Some plugins can only work if initialized after some other plugins. For example, transforming and applying CSS variables needs to run before running a plugin which uses these variables inside conditional transformations.
Con Harder to apply shared styles
Because you are working in Clojure, you can't just paste in raw css style snippets shared elsewhere.
