protocols

Some people asked me on how did I implement the nREPL client on Chlorine. So, I’m writing this post!

nREPL is a simple protocol. It uses “sessions” that are used to isolate evaluation contexts and other things (for example, on Chlorine every connection connect to two REPLs: one “primary” and one “auxiliar” that is used to run commands like autocomplete / goto var definition, and so on). On nREPL, this isn’t necessary: you just connect to a single REPL and use two different sessions. Just for the record, because the way Chlorine works, I didn’t implement it like this (because I would have to rewrite lots of code – maybe in the future).

Now, to explain the protocol, let’s separate things in parts: the first thing I do (and I was already doing in the past) is to connect to a socket. Then, I looked at the documentation for nREPL to understand how to send and receive commands to the REPL. Now, there are some details on the way that every operation is implemented that I simply ignored because it was not necessary to understand then from the perspective of my application…
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