karaxnim / karax Public

It uses a virtual DOM like React, but is much smaller than the existing frameworks plus of course it's written in Nim for Nim. No external dependencies! And thanks to Nim's whole program optimization only what is used ends up in the generated JavaScript code.

As you can see, karax comes with its own buildHtml DSL for convenient construction of (virtual) DOM trees (of type VNode). Karax provides a tiny build tool called karun that generates the HTML boilerplate code that embeds and invokes the generated JavaScript code::

Ok, so buildHtml introduces temporaries and calls add for the tree construction so that it composes with all of Nim's control flow constructs:

kstring is Karax's alias for cstring (which stands for "compatible string"; for the JS target that is an immutable JavaScript string) which is preferred for efficiency on the JS target. However, on the native targets kstring is mapped to string for efficiency. The DSL for HTML construction is also avaible for the native targets (!) and the kstring abstraction helps to deal with these conflicting requirements.

As the examples grow larger it becomes more and more visible of what a DSL that composes with the builtin Nim control flow constructs buys us. Once you have tasted this power there is no going back and languages without AST based macro system simply don't cut it anymore.

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