Clojure vs ClojureScript

Overview

Clojure

Stacks1.9K

Followers1.4K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars10.7K

Forks1.5K

ClojureScript

Stacks306

Followers294

Votes2

GitHub Stars9.3K

Forks791

Clojure vs ClojureScript: What are the differences?

What is Clojure? A dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

What is ClojureScript? A Clojure compiler targeting JavaScript. ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. It is designed to emit JavaScript code which is compatible with the advanced compilation mode of the Google Closure optimizing compiler.

Clojure and ClojureScript can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.

Clojure and ClojureScript are both open source tools. It seems that ClojureScript with 8.12K GitHub stars and 724 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Clojure with 7.85K GitHub stars and 1.25K GitHub forks.

CircleCI, Groupon, and Soundcloud are some of the popular companies that use Clojure, whereas ClojureScript is used by Swish, AdStage, and Multunus. Clojure has a broader approval, being mentioned in 95 company stacks & 80 developers stacks; compared to ClojureScript, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Clojure, ClojureScript

Fronted

Nov 23, 2020

Decided

We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.

You can read all about it in our linked blog post.

720k views720k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Clojure	ClojureScript
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.	ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. It is designed to emit JavaScript code which is compatible with the advanced compilation mode of the Google Closure optimizing compiler.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 10.7K	GitHub Stars 9.3K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 791
Stacks 1.9K	Stacks 306
Followers 1.4K	Followers 294
Votes 1.1K	Votes 2
Pros & Cons
Pros 118 It is a lisp 101 Concise syntax 100 Persistent data structures 90 jvm-based language 89 Concurrency Cons 11 Cryptic stacktraces 5 Need to wrap basically every java lib 4 Toxic community 3 Slow application startup 3 Good code heavily relies on local conventions	Pros 2 Functional and stable
Integrations
Java	JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Clojure, ClojureScript?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.