Clojurians Log v2
squint 2026-05-01
Did some testing and Squint is about 112kb compiled for the browser whereas Scittle is 184kb. 🤔
What do you mean “in the browser”? It depends what kinds of dependencies you use. Squint itself is small
I mean the ability to dynamically run cljs-like code, similar to what Scittle does. The Squint core is small but to parse cljs-like requires the full compiler. Is that right?
you mean with the evaluate stuff. yes, the compiler is written in CLJS so it pulls in a lot of stuff
Hm I wonder if it would compile with :lite 🤔
compile what? it's already JS
sorry wrong thread
The size actually went up. 😁
TIL: Squint's datastructure manipulation primitives compile out to about 1kb and if you include atoms and atom manipulation fns it's 3kb. So with that it's possible to bundle-out cljs-like datastructure functions into a separate library that can be use from JS to do things like assoc_in on native JS datastructures. I got to thinking about this when building very small JS based frontends with van.js and I don't like the data model that LLMs default to. It would be far better if I could have a top level single-source-of-truth datastructure and do cljs-style manipulation on it. I wonder if this would be useful/interesting to anybody else or am I off chasing butterflies again?
Implementation is trivial:
export {
get,
get_in,
nth,
peek,
contains_QMARK_,
assoc,
assoc_BANG_,
assoc_in,
update,
update_in,
conj,
conj_BANG_,
merge,
merge_with,
into,
dissoc,
dissoc_BANG_,
pop,
select_keys,
empty,
atom,
deref,
reset_BANG_,
swap_BANG_,
add_watch,
remove_watch
} from './src/squint/core.js';Build it like this:
npx esbuild squint-ds.js --bundle --minify --format=esm --outfile=squint-ds.min.jsThis is something I have personally needed when working on JS codebases. I wonder if there is any interest on having this squint-ds.min.js artifact built and available on e.g. npm and CDNs? I could put together a PR against the squint repo if that sounds like a good idea.
Why not use squint core directly ?
I'm thinking of the no-build use-case.
you can use squint core without a build? it's just a lib
That's true.
Having another lib re-export functions that already exist in the other lib should tell you this?
I guess the idea of having access to assoc etc. in a 1kb file excites me more than having it in a 61kb file.
oh right, you want minified
I missed that
I think that's reasonable since we also already have a umd build