tooling

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

Your editor as a query

Some time ago I found out this post: https://petevilter.me/post/datalog-typechecking/. It stroked me as really interesting – because it was an idea to make some IDE not depend on some internal API that only works for a single editor, but somehow make a tooling that’s query able by datalog. This datalog Read more…

By Maurício Szabo, ago

My fading frustration with ClojureScript

I’ve talked about at another post on how ClojureScript frustrates me, mostly because I was doing some Node.JS work and Figwheel simply wasn’t working correctly. Now, it’s time to revisit these points:

A little update: I talked a little with Thomas Heller, Shadow-CLJS creator, and he pointed me some issues with this article, so I’ll update it acordingly

Tooling

Figwheel and Lein are not the best tools to work with ClojureScript. Since I discovered shadow-cljs, things are working way better than before: I can reload ClojureScript code from any target, and I’m even experimenting with Hubot (and it works really fine too). The only thing I’m missing is my profiles.clj file, but I can live with that (and I can always use Shadow with Lein if I need profiles.clj).

Also, I’m working on a new package for Atom (and in the future, for another editors too) called Chlorine. One of the ideas is to offer better ClojureScript support (we have Autocomplete now!), using Socket REPL for solutions (even self-hosted REPLs like Lumo and Plank) and even wrap UNREPL protocol in Clojure. So far, is still in the very beginning but things are looking promising!

The stack

Forget Figwheel at all: Shadow-CLJS is probably the best tooling for ClojureScript ever. It auto-reloads ClojureScript code for the browser, for node.js, for node modules, and it integrates with almost everything that you want. It controls release optimizations, have sensible defaults, and even have post-compile hooks (so you can hook Clojure code to do something after some compilation phases). Also, it integrates with node-modules (no more maven-wrappers for JS libraries!) and have some warnings when you use some kind of ClojureScript code that would break :advanced compilation. And, let’s not forget that you can control the refresh reload phase, it adds a userful :include-macros in ns form (that will include all macros from the namespace being required), and controls exports in a sane manner. But first let’s begin with the feature that I found most useful: :before-load-async.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago