Clojure Roundup: Clojure on CLR and Javascript, Terracotta, New Release

Posted by Werner Schuster on Apr 05, 2009

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Java ,

.NET ,

Language ,

Ruby ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Performance & Scalability

Tags

Terracotta ,

CLR

While Clojure's moving towards a 1.0 release, interest in the language has reached other platforms as well.

Clojure-contrib now contains two implementations of Clojure on different platforms. A large part of Clojure's written in Clojure, so the implementatations can share a lot of the code:

• ClojureCLR is a port of Clojure to .NET
• ClojureScript compiles a subset of Clojure to Javascript, opening up interesting opportunities, eg. sharing the same Clojure code between server side and client (browser) side parts of an application.

Clojure users are experimenting with JVM libraries and frameworks. Clojure focuses on concurrency in one JVM and doesn't have special support for distributed work. Terracotta is a technology that allows to tie JVMs, on the same machine or distributed, together. Paul Stadig has been experimenting with getting Clojure to use Terracotta's features. (A similar project was attempted with JRuby). A recent progress report is promising:

So it looks like three of the biggest issues I had to work around in getting Clojure to work with Terracotta, will be resolved on the Terracotta side. This means that the Terracotta Integration Module that I wrote[3] will pretty much boil down to a configuration file.

Finally, a new Clojure release is available with these changes:

Incorporates all the recent additions - fully lazy seqs, :let option for doseq/for, letfn for mutually recursive local fns, synchronous watches, multi-arg set/union/difference/intersection, counted?, per- defmulti hierarchies, #_ ignore form reader macro, future-calls, future and pcalls/pvalues, defmulti docstrings and metadata, methods/ prefers for multimethod reflection, uniform metadata handling for atoms/refs/agents/vars/namespaces, condp, release-pending-sends, AOT tweaks to support applets and Android, etc. All this in addition to many fixes and enhancements.

The changes include the updated lazy behavior of sequences. The multimethod reflection support allows to look at the mapping between dispatch values and functions (using the methods function).

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