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Reactive updates is the big one, in my opinion. DataScript is a triumph and arguably is the reason why so many note-taking tools (Roam, Athens, Logseq, etc) are

by sekao 4y ago

Reactive updates is the big one, in my opinion. DataScript is a triumph and arguably is the reason why so many note-taking tools (Roam, Athens, Logseq, etc) are written in Clojure. But there are so many cases where it would be nice to react when some set of entities is changed. I think what we need is to figure out how to combine DataScript with a rules engine. I wrote a rules engine and made a writeup that compares the two together: "Using O'Doyle Rules as a poor man's DataScript" https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules/blob/master/bench-src/todos/README.md https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules/blob/master/bench-src/... Subscribing to individual entities is nice but with a rules engine you have so much more fine-grained control over your reactions. And with the RETE algorithm this can be done efficiently. Most libraries in this space just ignore it and make their own ad-hoc solution -- an informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a rules engine.

user5678 4y ago
austinbirch 4y ago
The rules engine direction is definitely an interesting one, hopefully there’s more exploration into that in the future. For my needs now I actually wrote something pretty hacky[1] to get a 'reactive' version of DataScript’s Entity API. As Nikita mentions in the article, I’ve found that most of the time I don’t really need queries in the UI, and so the entity API ends up fitting quite well – except that it’s non-reactive. The `reactive-entity` library implements a reactive version of (most of?) the entity API, so you can pass entities in/through components, and then the components only re-render when the attributes accessed within those components change (including attributes accessed on other entities through refs). Loads of room for improvement but I’ve used it successfully in a couple of projects. [1]: https://github.com/austinbirch/reactive-entity https://github.com/austinbirch/reactive-entity

by sekao 4y ago

user5678 4y ago

austinbirch 4y ago

The rules engine direction is definitely an interesting one, hopefully there’s more exploration into that in the future. For my needs now I actually wrote something pretty hacky[1] to get a 'reactive' version of DataScript’s Entity API. As Nikita mentions in the article, I’ve found that most of the time I don’t really need queries in the UI, and so the entity API ends up fitting quite well – except that it’s non-reactive. The `reactive-entity` library implements a reactive version of (most of?) the entity API, so you can pass entities in/through components, and then the components only re-render when the attributes accessed within those components change (including attributes accessed on other entities through refs). Loads of room for improvement but I’ve used it successfully in a couple of projects. [1]: https://github.com/austinbirch/reactive-entity https://github.com/austinbirch/reactive-entity