Reagent is nice and has been around for about a decade now, but I moved away from it towards very thin wrappers around React[1], because I felt like it was adding too much additional complexity on top of React, which is already quite complex on its own. I wanted a clearer view at what is going on and a simpler way to interop with native React components.
Although it seems to catch up with experimental support of React 18 now, Reagent has fallen behind the latest developments in React and may not benefit from all of its performance optimizations. It is still using class components instead of hooks and there have been concerns that the runtime conversion of Hiccup may drag down performance. I guess in most cases it is not really an issue or in any way noticable, so if you’re not doing any fancy stuff it should be fine. I may even come back to Reagent at some point, since I have to admit that I miss the UI-as-data model with Hiccup.
What I highly recommend, however, is using re-frame[2] for state management. It has also been around for a long time (2014, around the same time Reagent came along) and pioneered some popular ideas in that area. It may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but the docs provide a great introduction and I find the model very clear once you wrap your head around it. At the moment it depends on Reagent, but there are ways around that. [3]
Although it seems to catch up with experimental support of React 18 now, Reagent has fallen behind the latest developments in React and may not benefit from all of its performance optimizations. It is still using class components instead of hooks and there have been concerns that the runtime conversion of Hiccup may drag down performance. I guess in most cases it is not really an issue or in any way noticable, so if you’re not doing any fancy stuff it should be fine. I may even come back to Reagent at some point, since I have to admit that I miss the UI-as-data model with Hiccup.
What I highly recommend, however, is using re-frame[2] for state management. It has also been around for a long time (2014, around the same time Reagent came along) and pioneered some popular ideas in that area. It may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but the docs provide a great introduction and I find the model very clear once you wrap your head around it. At the moment it depends on Reagent, but there are ways around that. [3]
[1]: see Helix (https://github.com/lilactown/helix) or UIx (https://github.com/pitch-io/uix)
[2]: https://day8.github.io/re-frame/
[3]: refx (https://github.com/ferdinand-beyer/refx) is an almost drop-in replacement without the Reagent dependency, but hasn’t been updated in a while. Alternatively, re-frame can be integrated with UIx/Helix by adding some interop code https://github.com/pitch-io/uix/blob/master/docs/interop-wit...