janestreet/bonsai

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1390 stars · 57 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Bonsai is an OCaml library for building performant, reactive web applications on top of Js_of_ocaml, inspired by Elm. It uses purely functional state-machine components with incremental computation so values are only recomputed when their dependencies change.

Use cases

• build reactive web apps in OCaml
• create interactive UIs with incremental rendering
• manage stateful UI components without hoisting state to top level
• incrementalize expensive business logic on live-updating data
• build internal tools and dashboards
• compose state and rendering primitives a la carte

When to choose

• you write OCaml and want to target the web
• you need fine-grained incremental updates beyond just views
• you want Elm-style functional state machines with strong composability
• you're building data-heavy internal tools with live-updating datasets

When to avoid

• your team doesn't know OCaml or Jane Street's ecosystem
• you need a large ecosystem of ready-made UI components and libraries
• you want mainstream community support, tutorials, and hiring pool
• you're building a simple static site

Facets

framework · maturity active

frontend-framework state-management ui-components web-framework web-development frontend browser cross-platform ocaml js-of-ocaml reactive-ui incremental-computation elm-inspired web-server

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="janestreet/bonsai")