Pulsar

Goodbye, Chlorine. And welcome, Lazuli!

So, if you’re not familiar with Chlorine, or any of my tooling, let me get you a refresher. If you don’t want to read it all, the TL;DR; is – Chlorine is a Socket REPL plug-in for the Clojure, and ClojureScript languages. It also supports nREPL, although to a lesser extend, and it works on the Atom editor. It also contains a VSCode version called Clover, and I tried to port it to NeoVIM and I called it Clematis.

And now, it’s gone.

For historical reasons, I wanted to rename the project for a while – so that Chlorine would stay as a “socket REPL for the Atom editor” and the new plug-in would be the “Chlorine:Next” or something like this. I tried to like the name Alya, but in the end I never did…

… and then, I stopped working with Clojure. Like, at all. For a while I haven’t touched a single line of Clojure code, although I still use ClojureScript on my personal plug-ins. But ClojureScript have a weird problem – I can’t develop two plug-ins written in ClojureScript at the same time, so I need to compile everything, except for one, plug-in for “release”. Which is annoying to say the least, so that’s why I started the “Star Ring” metapackage – to make all plug-ins a “single, unified codebase”. Unfortunately, this have its own fractal of problems that I won’t discuss now.

So not that I’m now working with Ruby, I needed better tooling for Ruby otherwise I would go crazy. Leaving the “REPL-Driven Development” of Clojure behind is a nightmare, because it’s such a great tool and it somehow “grows” in you in such a way that you can’t imagine working in a codebase when you can’t evaluate your code all the time. And that’s where Lazuli appears… but again, because of the problems with not being able to develop Lazuli and Chlorine at the same time, Chlorine’s development stalled… and I decided to stop working on it to work in Lazuli.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Pulsar have a green CI, finally!

After so many months, finally we have a green CI – we can consider pull requests and changes that break the CI as “unstable”. This is a huge milestone, and I want to both thank everybody that tracked these failures to check if they were legit, to the people that fixed the legit failures and that fixed the flaky tests. This has been an amazing experience, and it helps build trust on the project!

If you look at the commits from the Atom project and check which ones have passing tests, you’ll see a horrible situation: they mostly don’t pass. There’s even a recent commit called “disable tests” that passes, and then the next commits also fail – so Atom was already failing tests when these were disabled (how is that possible, I won’t dare to think).

So it’s a huge milestone to have a CI that confidently (or at least we hope!) say if we broke something new! But on this post, I want to show not only how cool is that, but also the process and how to avoid flaky tests on the near future – both for Pulsar and for other projects
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Atom, community, and Pulsar

Okay, so recently I wrote about the Atom editor and how the community took efforts to revive the editor after the sunset announcement from Microsoft.

By now, things have changed a little bit. There was some disagreement on how the project should be handled from the atom-community maintainers: few people that were on the leadership decided that we should make “graceful changes” – things that do not disrupt too much the editor, small PRs that can be reviewed, and lots of stability. And I actually agree – that’s the way a project should be handled!

Except there’s a big catch: for me, this only works when the project is alive. The Atom editor is dead, for better or for worse. It’s announced already, so there’s no way “graceful changes” will be able to keep the editor alive or even relevant than, for example, VSCode – even for people that want a lightweight alternative or have want a different approach on handling code.

There were other disagreements on the roadmap – for some people, they wanted Atom to have the same functionality that it have today. And, speaking for me, I don’t agree – I think there are functionalities on the the Atom editor that are simply too much: for example, native support for CoffeeScript and TypeScript. I firmly believe that all Atom/Pulsar plug-ins should be transpiled – and that’s not only because the editor should only run JavaScript, it because it’s more reliable that way (the native support can fail between different tooling, language versions, etc. As an example, Atom supports plug-ins written in CoffeeScript 1.12 – and the current version is 2.7.0). Also, if a plug-in is bundled in a single JavaScript file, it’s actually more efficient both in terms of memory and performance for the editor.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago