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Chlorine is thriving!

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.

Design decisions

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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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Atom Packages with ClojureScript

One of the best things in Clojure (and ClojureScript) is that you can design your code connected in a live environment – so, your auto-complete abilities reflect exactly what’s running right now. Then, you can evaluate code with real data, to catch bugs or just test things. Then comes Atom, an editor that, in my opinion, is one of the easiest editors to create plugins (packages), using technologies we already know – mostly, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To program with Clojure, you can use proto-repl – an awesome package that, combined with ink, allows us to run clojure code and display right on the editor, Light Table style.

But then I became greedy and wanted more. I created clojure-plus, a package that extends proto-repl to be able to work with multiple projects, specially when these projects are not configured to be “refresh-friendly” or something. Most of the things I have in clojure-plus are simple helpers that I found missing in proto-repl, at least in the beginning.

But, after that, I began to work professionally with Clojure. And then, most of the projects had some kind of “strangeness”, mostly because everyone was using InteliJ with Cursive – a lot of people I knew didn’t even run the code, with exception of midje tests. So, I changed my package to work around these “strangeness”, and after a while, I saw that I was creating a big mess of code. Then, came ClojureScript support, and things became even more complicated… so, came the idea to port my package to ClojureScript, and after trying several things (Figwheel, Ajom, and other packages) I discovered that they could not solve my problems. The only one that worked, with restrictions, was Weasel, but then with some hacks things worked fine. So, here are the steps to make things work:
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By Maurício Szabo, ago