This week, I had a bug on Chlorine. It was a simple fix, a really simple one – I just had to move two lines from a place to another: https://github.com/mauricioszabo/repl-tooling/pull/53/files. The reason is that, on Chlorine, to connect to REPLs there are lots of intermediate steps: it first needs Read more…
Sometime ago, I did a post on how I work with Atom to develop Clojure and ClojureScript projects. It is in Portuguese, so I’m gonna re-visit the subject and also update with my current workflow.
There are two packages that I have to install to work with Clojure: lisp-paredit and chlorine. Without lisp-paredit, when I start a newline, the indentation gets all sorts of problematic. I use it on “strict mode” and use the tools to slurp/barf forward only. As for chlorine, it is needed to have autocomplete, evaluation, show documentation, goto var definition and so on. Last, I use also parinfer so I can remove whole lines of text and parinfer will infer the correct closing of parenthesis for me (most of the time at least).
Now, how exactly do I work with Clojure? When you use lein or boot, you’ll get a nREPL port. This is not the port you use with Chlorine, so I need a bit more of work. I can’t just start a REPL with lein repl or clj, I need to inform the tool to open a socket-repl server. The JVM option needed is: '-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}'. So, the commands below are what I use with lein or clj:
JAVA_OPTS='-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}' lein repl
or
clj -J'-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}'
This will open a REPL at port 5555 (or I can change the port if necessary). Then, it’s time to fire up the Atom’s command palette and select “Connect Clojure Socket REPL”, put 5555 on the port, and connect. Then, I’ll use “Refresh Namespaces” or “Load file” command to load my latest version of code into the REPL, and start working.
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Sometimes you make some tooling because you want to use it; sometimes, to experiment; and sometimes to test the waters.
The last tooling in that I did was one of these cases – now there’s a port of Chlorine to Visual Studio Code called Clover!
Now, when I started the project I imagined that VSCode would not have all the features that I have in Atom, nor all the APIs that I want to use – for example I didn’t have any hope of having the inline results in this version.
The thing is, I wasn’t expecting it to be so bad! To begin with, the API: is not really that bad documented, but compared to the Atom, it is incredibly weak. The first thing is that they expect you to use TypeScript so there’s little to no documentation on how to represent objects in pure JavaScript; for example in some cases you can use pure objects, on others you have to instantiate a TypeScript class in the JavaScript code. Also, there are multiple parts of the documentation when they just give you the type signatures and little (or even no) explanation (and let’s make a little detour here: what’s the deal with some people that use static types, that they expect you to understand how any API work just by showing the types of the functions?).
The second part is that VSCode expects you to fit your plug-in infrastructure on what they offer – so, some functionalities will land on the “peek definition” API, others on “Code Lens” and so on. The problem is that they don’t explain what’s a “code lens” for example nor give you any screenshots of the functionality in action – mostly the documentation is some code examples in GitHub repositories so you have to download, install the example extension on your machine and then run it to simply understand how something works.
The second hard part is that you can’t test the API in the devtools – in fact the devtools is almost useless because when you have an error, the stacktrace will point you to a minified JS code in the VSCode internal API. Also, some exception messages are completely obscure and some log errors on the devtools but things work fine on the editor. Well, to summarize: it’s completely useless to depend on the errors.
But the worst part, at least for REPL-Tooling, is that you can’t change the UI of VSCode in any way – and this means no pop-ups, no new elements, no console in the editor, nothing – the only way you have that you can extend the visual components is by implementing a webview – and by webview I am not saying an “electrom webview” when you can access all the Node.JS APIs – I am saying a simple web page when you have to pass your data to and from the editor using JSON. And and that’s all there is – no Date, no JavaScript classes and, of course no Clojure objects.
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While I’m developing Chlorine, sometimes I need to test multiple specific implementations of lots of really complicated stuff like REPL state, connection, async stuff (as the project is ClojureScript on Node.JS, all I/O treatment is via callbacks) and the complicated nature of rendering multiple different object types on Atom editor. I had multiple regression errors, then I’ve created some “acceptance” tests (these open up a real Atom editor and evaluate commands on it). The problem with these tests should be obvious: they are slow, and I mean REALLY SLOW, and they need a real Atom editor, lots of setups, and because Atom is not really predictable on its actions (sometimes you connect REPL and it changes the focus on the editor) there are lots of unnecessary interactions on the editor just to have less false-negatives.
Now, as I told before, I’m developing Chlorine together with REPL-Tooling, a library that should contain all tooling for any editor capable of running Javascript to run a port or Chlorine. There’s still too much on Chlorine that relies on internal Atom APIs (for example, detection of the beginning and end of forms is one, detection of namespace’s forms is other) but time is passing and more and more is being moved to REPL-Tooling, and as soon as the detection of forms is on REPL-Tooling (and is stable) there should be possible to port most Clojure parts to REPL-Tooling, and then I can think on how to refactor the ClojureScript part, test it, and then Chlorine will be a very easy project to port. Also, as a proof-of-concept there’s Clematis for NeoVIM (it’s still on the very beginning and nothing much happened after I wrote about it here), and also an “electron fake editor” that I’m using as test.
Wait, What?
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Recently I began to migrate some of the code on Chlorine to REPL Tooling, so things may become more testable. I already found multiple bugs in this approach and began an integration test methodology using Electron (I say that there are three kinds of developers in the field of automated tests – the ones that don’t test, the ones that do, and test freaks. I’m probably the later).
In the beginning, the idea would be to rewrite the renderer of results and exceptions so that I could fix lots of bugs that they have. So far, it’s progressing slowly, but I already can render datomic results in a meaningful way (the last renderer was interpreting as Java objects, which they indeed are) and fix some bugs with tags and other issues.
Now, one of the things that I wanted in the new renderer is the ability to copy/paste results in a meaningful way – as I’m using UNREPL, there are lots of tags that need to be reinterpreted, like #unrepl/browseable for datafy. These need to be “translated” to something useful for rendering on screen, with links to navigate inner details, but for copy-paste they should have a textual representation that makes sense (probably the hard part).
The results of all these experiments are quite interesting – when you evaluate something and th result is a Java object, there’s a link ... that can be used to navigate inside the object: it’ll show getters, the current class, methods that the object supports, so things like “goto definition for Java object” or “Javadocs” aren’t really necessary.
Then, one of my friends asked for a Vim option. Just for fun, I started Clematis, a port of Chlorine to NeoVim. And it seems they things are progressing faster than I thought!
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When I started this project, I was experimenting with shadow-cljs to see if I would be able to make an Atom package that would auto reload, run tests on ClojureScript, and se how far could I push ClojureScript in an Atom package.
Now, some months later, I’m seeing the package being used by a bunch of people, and I even discovered some bugs in UNREPL! Now, on this post, I’ll discuss a little bit more in detail the design decisions and my vision on the future of the project.
Chlorine is a clojure and ClojureScript atom package. It connects to a socket repl (opened via lein, boot, clj, shadow-cljs, lumo, or even REBL) and then upgrades the repl to be programmatically oriented with unrepl. Unrepl only works on Clojure, so for ClojureScript we use other techniques. Also, socket repl is a stream protocol, so to emulate a “request-response”, we need to coordinate things so Atom (and other editors) can react to commands and know exactly what’s the correct response for each command sent.
The choice for UNREPL was mostly because there is almost no documentation about prepl so far. Also, Socket REPL is literally everywhere: on Clojure , on ClojureCLR, on Lumo and Plank. Also, I wanted a better way to use ClojureScript, and I still have nightmares trying to use it over nREPL… and with Socket REPL things work fine.
Also, when I started the project Clojure 1.10 was just alpha software, and UNREPL offers us insanely good support for lazy lists, big strings, and other things that I wanted to use out of the box. One of the problems I’m still facing is coordination of evaluate/response, but this will probably be solved after a bunch of other fixes I’ll try.
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This will be just a simple anouncement: I’m publishing my (still very crude!) plug-in for Clojure’s Socket REPL on Atom. Chlorine was an experiment that grew more than I could imagine: I wanted a better way to write ClojureScript on Atom, and that’s the reason I made Clojure-Plus (also, I Read more…