Specular is a library for building Web-based UIs in PureScript, based on Functional Reactive Programming (FRP). It is heavily inspired by Reflex and Reflex-DOM and supports a similar programming model.
There's a tutorial currently in the making: Tutorial (incomplete)
Currently there's no tutorial or introductory documentation. However, there's plenty of material about Reflex-Dom. See A Beginner-friendly Step by Step Tutorial for Reflex-Dom for a good introduction to the programming model. It should be adapted to PureScript and Specular in the near future.
There are some examples that are also integration tests. They can be viewed in a Web browser:
npm run build-demo
$WWW_BROWSER test/demo.html
In short: code size. Specular demos are 240K unminified (with DCE - pulp build -O), or 19K minified with uglifyjs -c -m and gzipped. In contrast, a a GHCJS
(0.2.1.9007019) program that prints Hello World (no DOM bindings included,
just base) weighs 1.1M unminified, or 62K minified with Closure Compiler's
ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS and gzipped. Supporting Haskell semantics has a cost.
There are also other reasons, of course.
See Motivation.
This library uses purescript-io
instead of the usual Eff for imperative code. This is not a popular choice,
but it made designing the library easier. It may change in the future, once I
find a good way to wrangle effects in the FRP primitives.
Some of the cons of Specular:
-
No good way to do server-side rendering. Local state complicates this.
-
Performance may be sometimes bad, because it does not use any Virtual DOM - the element placement instructions you write translate pretty much directly to
createElement/appendChild. There are no benchmarks yet. -
Time travel debugging, as known from Elm, is not possible.
-
Currently no way to bind to React Native.
-
Programs written with Specular may be harder to understand for some people who prefer the single state variable approach.
-
Compared to Reflex, it has way less FRP combinators.
-
Creating recursive data flows is more cumbersome than in Reflex, because PureScript has eager evaluation and no
RecursiveDo. -
It's immature and not popular, and may have bugs.
If you think there are more, please open an issue. They should be listed.