Clojure vs Electron

Overview

Clojure

Stacks1.9K

Followers1.4K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars10.7K

Forks1.5K

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

Clojure vs Electron: 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 Electron? Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub. With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Clojure belongs to "Languages" category of the tech stack, while Electron can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Desktop Development".

"It is a lisp" is the primary reason why developers consider Clojure over the competitors, whereas "Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" was stated as the key factor in picking Electron.

Clojure and Electron are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Clojure with 7.82K GitHub stars and 1.25K GitHub forks.

Intuit, GoSquared, and InVisionApp are some of the popular companies that use Electron, whereas Clojure is used by CircleCI, Groupon, and Soundcloud. Electron has a broader approval, being mentioned in 213 company stacks & 366 developers stacks; compared to Clojure, which is listed in 95 company stacks and 76 developer stacks.

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Advice on Clojure, Electron

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

Semih

Software Engineering Manager

Oct 1, 2020

Needs adviceon

JavaScript

HTML5

.NET

Hi,

We are planning to develop a brand new UX for an already existing desktop software. The previous version is developed on C#.NET with Winforms & WPF. Our plan is to use JavaScript/HTML5 based frontend technologies for the new software. For some components, we are highly dependent on .NET/ .NET Core because the JS-based versions are not mature enough.

What would you choose for a desktop-based Engineering Software that supports multi-OS and has rich UI capabilities considering the .NET dependencies?

Thanks in advance,

Semih

57.9k views57.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Clojure	Electron
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.	With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.
-	Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
Statistics
GitHub Stars 10.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.9K	Stacks 11.6K
Followers 1.4K	Followers 10.0K
Votes 1.1K	Votes 148
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 69 Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications 53 Open source 14 Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code 8 Because it's cross platform 4 Use Node.js in the Main Process Cons 19 Uses a lot of memory 8 User experience never as good as a native app 4 No proper documentation 4 Does not native 1 Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
Integrations
Java	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Clojure, Electron?

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.