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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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