2023 Long Term Projects: May and June Updates

2023 Long-Term Projects

Bozhidar Batsov
Michiel Borkent
Sean Corfield
Eric Dallo
Christophe Grand
Thomas Heller
Nikita Prokopov
Tommi Reiman
Peter Stromberg
Peter Taoussanis

Q1 2023 Projects

Aleph/Manifold: Matthew Davidson
Donut: Daniel Higginbotham

Bozhidar Batsov

CIDER

For the past few months the primary focus of my Clojure-related work was CIDER. We’ve made some important steps toward the next release:

• We’re working on a “debug on error” functionality (see https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/pull/3337) This also resulted in some internal improvements to the existing debugger codebase.
• We’re working on a new way to interact with application logs from CIDER, which we currently call “cider-log-mode” (see https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/pull/3352)
  • This also resulted in the creation of the standalone library logjam, which CIDER uses internally.
• We’re now using the latest version of compliment, which comes which a bunch of code completion improvements (see https://github.com/alexander-yakushev/compliment/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#0315-2023-06-22)

As usual the next release will also feature a few smaller improvements and bugfixes that you can peruse here. Just as importantly we’ve started to discuss the plans for CIDER 2.0. Everyone’s more than welcome to participate in the conversation there!

In other news:

• There’s a small new bugfix release of clojure-mode (see https://github.com/clojure-emacs/clojure-mode/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#5161-2023-06-26)
• There are also new releases of orchard and cider-nrepl
• We’re working on some improvements for refactor-nrepl and enrich-classpath
  

Michiel Borkent

In this post I’ll give updates about open source I worked on during May and June 2023. To see previous OSS updates, go here.

Sponsors

I’d like to thank all the sponsors and contributors that make this work possible!

Top sponsors:

• Clojurists Together
• Roam Research
• Nextjournal
• Toyokumo
• Cognitect
• Kepler16
• Adgoji

If you want to ensure that the projects I work on are sustainably maintained, you can sponsor this work in the following ways. Thank you!

Github Sponsors:

• The Babaska or Clj-kondo OpenCollective
• Ko-fi
• Patreon
• Clojurists Together

If you’re used to sponsoring through some other means which isn’t listed above, please get in touch. On to the projects that I’ve been working on!

May 2023 Updates

The following projects had updates in May 2023. Note that only highlights are mentioned and not a full overview of all changes. See the project’s changelogs for all changes.

• Preparations for babashka conf are in full swing and I’m preparing a talk with the title ‘Growing an ecosystem’.
• This month I’ve had the honor to visit the JUXT 10 year anniversary in London and met a lot of fellow Clojurians over there.
• Babashka and SCI will be featured at the last iteration of Strange Loop!
• My OSS work is funded by Clojurists Together in Q2
• clj-kondo: static analyzer and linter for Clojure code that sparks joy.
  • Version 2023.05.18 - 2023.05.26 were released. Full changelogs here. Highlights:
  • Linter :uninitialized-var moved from default :level :off to :warning
  • #2065: new linter :equals-true: suggest using (true? x) over (= true x) (defaults to :level :off).
  • #2066: new linters :plus-one and :minus-one: suggest using (inc x) over (+ x 1) (and similarly for dec and -, defaults to :level :off)
  • #2058: warn about #() and #"" in .edn files
• babashka: native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting.
  • Released 1.3.180, mostly a maintenance release
  • See the complete CHANGELOG
• scittle: Execute Clojure(Script) directly from browser script tags via SCI
  • #58: build system for creating scittle distribution with custom libraries. See plugins/demo.
  • Use window.location.hostname for WebSocket connection instead of hardcoding "localhost" (@pyrmont)
  • Upgrade sci.configs to "33bd51e53700b224b4cb5bda59eb21b62f962745"
  • Update nREPL implementation: implement eldoc (info, lookup) (@benjamin-asdf)
• deps.clj: A faithful port of the clojure CLI bash script to Clojure
  • Introduce all new programmatic API
  • Automatically use file when exceeding Windows argument length
• deps.add-lib: Clojure 1.12’s add-lib feature for leiningen and/or other environments without a specific version of the clojure CLI
  • First clojars release
• nbb: Scripting in Clojure on Node.js using SCI
  • Nbb is now compatible with bun. To run nbb in a bun project, use bunx --bun nbb.
• squint: CLJS syntax to JS compiler
  • Fix import with $default
• cherry Experimental ClojureScript to ES6 module compiler
  • Support with-out-str
• http-client: Babashka’s http-client
  • Add :authenticator option
• sci.configs: A collection of ready to be used SCI configs.
  • This project now has a configuration for datascript, for anyone who wants to use SCI together with datascript. See this commit.
• SCI: Configurable Clojure/Script interpreter suitable for scripting and Clojure DSLs
  • Support :require-macros
• process: Clojure library for shelling out / spawning sub-processes
  • Support :pre-start-fn in exec
  • Allow passing :cmd in map argument
  • Better testing for exec by @lread
• fs - File system utility library for Clojure
  • :paths argument for fs/which by @lread
  • Support inputstream in fs/copy
  • Add fs/owner to return owner of file

Other projects

These are (some of the) other projects I’m involved with but little to no activity happened in the past month.

• edamame: Configurable EDN/Clojure parser with location metadata
  • Improvements for reading namespaced maps
• babashka.book: Babashka manual
  • Several corrections
  • Dynamic :exec-args
  • Script-adjacent bb.edn docs
• CLI: Turn Clojure functions into CLIs!
  • Support --no-option and parse as {:option false}
  • Support grouped aliase like -ome as {:o true, :m true, :e true}
• pod-babashka-go-sqlite3: A babashka pod for interacting with sqlite3
  • Better error message when connection is not a string
• instaparse-bb
  • Add transform function
• jet: CLI to transform between JSON, EDN, YAML and Transit using Clojure
  • Add option to elide commas
• quickdoc: Quick and minimal API doc generation for Clojure
• rewrite-clj: Rewrite Clojure code and edn
• sql pods: babashka pods for SQL databases
• pod-babashka-buddy: A pod around buddy core (Cryptographic Api for Clojure).
• gh-release-artifact: Upload artifacts to Github releases idempotently
• neil: A CLI to add common aliases and features to deps.edn-based projects
• cljs-showcase: Showcase CLJS libs using SCI
• carve - Remove unused Clojure vars
• grasp: Grep Clojure code using clojure.spec regexes
• quickblog: Light-weight static blog engine for Clojure and babashka
• lein2deps: leiningen to deps.edn converter
• 4ever-clojure - Pure CLJS version of 4clojure, meant to run forever!
• pod-babashka-lanterna: Interact with clojure-lanterna from babashka
• pod-babashka-fswatcher: babashka filewatcher pod
• joyride: VSCode CLJS scripting and REPL (via SCI)
• clj2el: transpile Clojure to elisp
• deflet: make let-expressions REPL-friendly!
• babashka.json: babashka JSON library/adapter

June 2023 Updates

First a few updates of what I’ve been up to outside of sitting behind a screen. June was packed with two trips and a vacation so there aren’t as many updates as usual.

• Babashka-conf happened June 10th in Berlin. It was more than I could have hoped for: a professionally organized event with the creative, positive, welcoming spirit we’re used to from other Clojure conferences. Thanks everybody for coming out, especially to the speakers, organization and Malcolm + staff for recording the videos. You can view all the talks here. To see photos, comments, etc you can look for the #babashka_conf hash-tag on social media.
• I’ve had the pleasure to visit the JUXT 10th year anniversary this month in London. Check out this wonderful talk by Alexander Davis on the state of frontend, with some nice comments about squint at the end.
• End of June and beginning of July I’m away on a vacation to Switzerland to recover a bit from all of this fun. I hope to take it easy on the coding and just relax a bit and recharge for what is to come next.
• Babashka and SCI will be featured at the last iteration of Strange Loop!

The following projects had updates in June. Note that only highlights are mentioned and not a full overview of all changes. See the project’s changelogs for all changes.

• squint: CLJS syntax to JS compiler and cherry Experimental ClojureScript to ES6 module compiler
  • Both projects can now be used simultaneously in one build. The use case for this is when you have projects like clerk that ship with multiple options for evaluating CLJS at runtime and you want to offer both squint and cherry as options.
• sql pods: babashka pods for SQL databases
  • Version 0.1.2 was released which contains upgrades of database drivers and next.jdbc library. Also a bug was fixed around mssql.
• CLI: Turn Clojure functions into CLIs!
  • Implemented an alternative to shutdown-agents which does not kill threads when using an exec function, e.g. when spinning up a web server. Also see TDEPS-198.
• cljs-showcase: Showcase CLJS libs using SCI
  • Namespace state is now preserved over multiple blocks
• clj-kondo: static analyzer and linter for Clojure code that sparks joy.
  • Actively working towards a new release, probably next month.
• fs - File system utility library for Clojure
  • Add gzip and gunzip functions (thanks to Lauri Oherd)
• deps.clj: A faithful port of the clojure CLI bash script to Clojure
  • Tried to improve the situation where the downloaded tools jar may be corrupt and causes trouble when calculating the classpath, using a crc32 check. See babashka issue.
• SCI: Configurable Clojure/Script interpreter suitable for scripting and Clojure DSLs
  • Support :require-macros
  • Introduce eval-string+ which received an optional initial :ns key and also returns the last active :ns so you can preserve the namespace state over multiple evaluations.
  • Released v0.8.40
• process: Clojure library for shelling out / spawning sub-processes
  • Implement :out :bytes to receive output as bytes (thanks Hans Bugge Grathwohl)
  • Make :dir option accept java.nio.file.Path
• babashka: native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting.
  • 1575: fix command line parsing problem with -e + *command-line-args*
  • 1576: make downloading/unzipping of deps.clj tools .zip file more robust (see deps.clj)
  • released version 1.3.181
  • 1581: bb print-deps: sort dependencies (thanks to Teodor Heggelund)
  • 1579: add clojure.tools.reader/resolve-symbol built-in

Other projects

These are (some of the) other projects I’m involved with but little to no activity happened in the past month.

• scittle: Execute Clojure(Script) directly from browser script tags via SCI
• nbb: Scripting in Clojure on Node.js using SCI
• http-client: Babashka’s http-client
• sci.configs: A collection of ready to be used SCI configs.
• edamame: Configurable EDN/Clojure parser with location metadata
• babashka.book: Babashka manual
• pod-babashka-go-sqlite3: A babashka pod for interacting with sqlite3
• instaparse-bb
• jet: CLI to transform between JSON, EDN, YAML and Transit using Clojure
• quickdoc: Quick and minimal API doc generation for Clojure
• rewrite-clj: Rewrite Clojure code and edn
• pod-babashka-buddy: A pod around buddy core (Cryptographic Api for Clojure).
• gh-release-artifact: Upload artifacts to Github releases idempotently
• neil: A CLI to add common aliases and features to deps.edn-based projects
• carve - Remove unused Clojure vars
• grasp: Grep Clojure code using clojure.spec regexes
• quickblog: Light-weight static blog engine for Clojure and babashka
• lein2deps: leiningen to deps.edn converter
• 4ever-clojure - Pure CLJS version of 4clojure, meant to run forever!
• pod-babashka-lanterna: Interact with clojure-lanterna from babashka
• pod-babashka-fswatcher: babashka filewatcher pod
• joyride: VSCode CLJS scripting and REPL (via SCI)
• clj2el: transpile Clojure to elisp
• deflet: make let-expressions REPL-friendly!
• babashka.json: babashka JSON library/adapter
• deps.add-lib: Clojure 1.12’s add-lib feature for leiningen and/or other environments without a specific version of the clojure CLI

Discuss this post here. Tagged: clojure oss updates

Sean Corfield

In my previous Long-Term Funding update I said I would review/overhaul the Libraries pages (both authoring and the directory) and write the tools.build cookbook.

The library authoring guide has been rewritten to use the Clojure CLI, deps-new, and deps-deploy and was well-received by the community, who provided some useful feedback that I have also incorporated into the guide. The information from the library directory has been integrated into The Clojure Toolbox via a couple of Pull Requests that added optional tool-tip descriptions and libraries that were on clojure-doc but missing from the Toolbox. Thanks to James Reeves for accepting those PRs!

What else did I get done?<!–more–>

ClojureCLR, HoneySQL

There’s been quite a bit of activity around ClojureCLR recently, so I’ve been testing .NET-related things on Windows and on Ubuntu. David Miller submitted a patch to tools.cli to add CLR support which I released as tools.cli v1.0.219 and I updated HoneySQL to add CLR support: honeysql v2.4.1033.

tools.nrepl has been ported to ClojureCLR and Peter Strömberg (maintainer of Calva) has created a ClojureCLR starter project for VS Code/Calva which I’ve also been helping to test on Windows and Ubuntu.

HoneySQL saw another release, mostly improving documentation and docstrings, near the end of the this period: v2.4.1045. Both releases improved the experience with :on-conflict clauses.

next.jdbc

next.jdbc v1.3.883 was also released in this period, also mostly improving documentation and docstrings, and adding an active-tx? predicate to expose whether next.jdbc thinks you are currently in a with-transaction context.

clojure-doc.org

All of the content from the library directory has been incorporated into The Clojure Toolbox at this point. Every library that was previously listed on clojure-doc.org is now listed on the Toolbox and all of the one-line descriptions have been added to the Toolbox as well (which now show up as tooltips when you hover over the library name/link). The Toolbox still has a lot of libraries listed without descriptions so, hopefully, that’s something the community can add over time (or help James with automating, using project descriptions from GitHub, perhaps?).

The library authoring guide has been substantially rewritten to use the Clojure CLI, deps.edn, and build.clj. The old Leiningen-based library authoring guide has been lightly updated and is still available, linked from the new guide.

In addition to the library work mentioned above, I’ve been working on the tools.build cookbook. I shared an early draft to get community feedback and then shared the completed version this week. The whole thing is over 3,000 words now, with a lot of code examples. I’ve tried to distill everything I’ve learned about tools.build into a single document that covers various scenarios that go beyond what is in the official tools.build guide.

Some additional community feedback has already been incorporated and more will be incorporated over the next few weeks, I expect.

What’s Next?

In July/August, I’m hoping to complete a review and update of both the “ecosystem” and “tutorials” section of clojure-doc.org, and then in the two remaining periods, I’ll tackle the “cookbooks” and “language” sections.

On a personal note…

I mentioned in the previous update that my mother was in hospital and I want to thank everyone who reached out to me with kind words and support. She came home and was doing well for a while but then she had another fall and she’s back in hospital as I write this, this time with severe anemia on top of her other issues. She’s had a blood transfusion and seems to be doing better but we don’t know when she’ll be home. It’s times like these when I really do feel the five and a half thousand miles between us…

{:tags [“clojure” “clojure-doc.org” “honeysql” “clojure-clr” “jdbc” “open source” “community” “clojurists together”]}

Eric Dallo

During these 2 months, I mainly focused on improving clojure-lsp, fixing bugs and adding some features mentioned above, especially improving the java support. Also, I’ve been working for some months now in a new Intellij plugin called clojure-lsp-intellij, which I should finish the alpha and announce soon!

clojure-lsp

Main highlights:

• Recently I focused on java interop improvements in both clojure-lsp and clj-kondo, so now we have more java analysis to provide features, we have now hover doc (pic1) and completion for java static members! We still have to enhance clj-kondo and lsp to be able to provide for all java usages besides static ones only, but it’s a huge start!
• Keywords completions are now smarter, checking other namespaces and sorting better.
• We have more visual feedbacks when LSP is doing post start tasks in the editor.
• clojure-lsp now understands ClojureDart projects!
  

2023.05.04-19.38.01

General

• Bump clj-kondo to 2023.04.15-20230503.152749-8

Editor

• Fix edn tree to consider symbols. #1556
• Fix edn tree to consider vector root nodes. #1557
• Fix edn tree to handle invalid edn code and not throw exceptions while typing code.

API/CLI

• Avoid enabling unecessary analysis features for API/CLI lint, improving memory usage.

2023.07.01-22.35.41

General

• Update flake.nix to build with babashka. #1373
• Bump clj-kondo to 2023.06.02-20230630.144012-16.
• Improve support for ClojureDart .cljd files. #1589
• Slightly reduce OutOfMemory exceptions that may happen with the JVM version.
• Support ignore unused-public-vars via :linters :clojure-lsp/unused-public-var :exclude-when-contains-meta clj-kondo setting.
• Fix restructure-keys when map has an :or. #1583
• Bump lsp4clj to 1.8.0.
• Add post startup tasks progress feedbacks, like “Generating stubs”, “Analyzing JDK source” and “Fetching Clojars”.
• Bump cljfmt to 0.10.6. #1605

Editor

• New code actions: Replace ':refer :all' with ':refer [my-refer]' and Replace ':refer :all' with alias. #1575
• Enhance java support for hover and completion of static class members.
• Improve :paths-ignore-regex to ignore features avoiding impact in huge files that are intented to be excluded.
• Fixed semantic-tokens for full qualified namespace
• Add score to completion items for a better completion client sorting. #1595
• Revamp keyword completion. #1599
• Avoid LSP errors when cleaning a file without namespaces. #1603

API/CLI

• New feature: Find all references via API and CLI. #1572

clj-kondo

#2106: Support .cljd files as source files.

jet.el

#7: json with ' (single quote) fails to convert to edn.

Christophe Grand

ClojureDart

The period started on the Conj heels and we were all pumped up. We’re seeing a steady influx of new users. With more users we spent more time supporting them but experienced users are starting to help too, and we are getting more PRs, it’s a good sign!

Two of the “future work” items of previous update have landed during this period: Dart 3 support and the new reader.

Last, we started publishing short videos on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@clojuredart/shorts (Don’t check your speakers they don’t have audio.)

Fixes

Several fixes to the compiler, cljd.core or flutter.cljd.

Amongst them:

• rseq wasn’t behaving properly on vectors whose size was a multiple of 32,
• some code was improperly optimized away when a throw appeared in some nested ifs in statement position,
• widgets below a :vsync were not refresh on app state changes, only on animation updates,
• issues with set! expressions used in argument position,
• potential double evaluation when casting to a nullable type,
• …

Improvements

• Tear-offs of default constructors. Dart has this feature that a method (or even a constructor) can be “torn off”: if you don’t specify an argument list you get a closure over the object with the same signature as the method (same idea for constructors – if you don’t know Dart: Dart doesn’t support overloading so constructors (but the default) are named, they are just static methods).
• Documentation on generics
• Documenting the fact that defs are initialized on demand and not eagerly.
• We started populating a FAQ
• We spent a lot of time improving compilation time (we found a lot of small gains until we finally found the function with a quadratic runtime), some users saw their recompilation time go from almost 2 minutes to a couple of seconds.
• more samples (Wevbiew, FFI to C)
• require named
• some and every? are now based on reduce to avoid sequences
• inst literals can now appear in source code,br>

New features

• Dart 3. Dart 3 supports landed in two times: first a couple of days after the release of Dart 3 which made sure that ClojrueDart was compiling to proper Dart 3 (because Dart 3 has breaking changes over Dart 2.12 – but we can still target Dart 2, we autodetect which one is used). Then in a second time we got records support – Dart records are immutable typed tuples and are a new feature of Dart 3.
• Finally the new reader (which can be used asynchronously if a stream is consue but synchronously when reading a string) landed. Support for tagged literals is still in the work.
• We ported clojure.set (and its tests) as cljd.set, it was mostly a copy/paste & tweak port.

Future work: ClojureDart

• Add tagged literals to the reader
• We have found a path allowing a Flutter-only REPL could be hacked in a couple of days, is it still worth the hack?
• Look into porting Datascript and SCI to ClojureDart
• New APIs to leverage our persistent data structures:
  • maps (hash and sorted) in ClojureDart are original implementations (not the same as CLJ/CLJS) – hash maps could be seen as another refinement of the original, sorted maps constitute a novel implementation.
  • Sorted colls should be good enough for direct use by Datascript.
  • Both hash and sorted maps can support accelerated merge/diff/join/etc. operations.
• Multimethods
• cljd CLI written in cljd for easier project creation etc.
• gen tests
• …
  

Thomas Heller

shadow-cljs

Time was mostly spent on doing maintenance work and some bugfixes. As well as helping people out via the typical channels (eg. Clojurians Slack).

Current shadow-cljs version: 2.24.1 Changelog

Notable Updates

• Added full support for package.json "exports" since its use has become more widespread.
  

Nikita Prokopov

Less releases these last two months, more research and reports.

DataScript:

• Lots of small optimizations for ClojureScript version (who would’ve thought that declare or case could be slow?), with roughly up to 7% perf improvements across the board.
• Prototyping faster “index sub-slicing” for cases when you e.g. need to find values of the same attribute accross many entities. Seeing up to 30% improvements for this particular case on Roam 3M datoms graph.

Humble UI:

• Prototyping state management solution based on signals

Clojure Sublimed:

• Better indenting of reader conditionals (turned out they use parentheses, but their content is more like a map).

Blogging:

• Humble Chronicles: Managing State with Signals. Some research about what to do with components in Humble UI.
• A Case for ClojureScript 2.0. Some reflection on why ClojureScript feels so different from Clojure and where I think it should be going.
  

Tommi Reiman

Had a busy 2 months and did not have enough focus time to deliver the things I planned on OS. Just started my 9 week summer vacation, will be few weeks off the grid, but then will jump back into OS.

Malli

• Continued with the new effective type system - WIP
• Working with Schema inheritance (optional, solving real-world problems), WIP

Reitit

• Work on the upcoming 0.7.0 Version, with 5 new alpha releases. Thanks for all the alpha-testers!
• Managed to fix a foundational issue by Introducing two-phase Schema compilation
• Goal was to ship the 0.7.0 out in June, but ended up not being happy with the new syntax and started to do a big refactor on it. Almost done.

Something else

Summer.

Peter Stromberg

As usual the bulk of my open source energy is poured into Calva, a Clojure/ClojureScript/ClojureCLR/ClojureDart/Babashka/nbb/Joyride /etcetera development environment that takes Interactive Programming seriously.

I also got to contribute to Clojure-related starter projects and was interviewed for Flexiana’s new Clojure Corner series: Clojure Corner with Peter Strömberg

Calva

Over at Twitter someone asked me if I was up to something exciting. Implicitly wondering if Calva was about to get some cool new big thing (I think). My answer was that it is mostly about maintenance currently. However, I find Calva maintenance exciting!

Maintenance has many aspects. Is the documentation helpful? Are there bugs that create that extra friction making them a priority? Is there some feature that could be made more powerful with some change? What about some new features I feel curious about and that I can finish with one or two late-night hacking sessions? The best part: I get to talk to Calva users and consider their feedback, questions and suggestions.

Here’s a summary of Calva maintenance May + June 2023. I’m including some of the rationales, to give you a feel for how we reason when maintaining Calva. Wall of text:

• Calva now makes an effort to try format code with incomplete structure (missing opening or closing brackets). This is common when formatting a selection, or formatting pasted code. It gets extra important for beginners who do not ”see” the structure as clearly as us with experience from Clojure or some other LISP(s). Not being familiar with the structure also makes you less likely to use Calva’s structural editing power. Having the broken code formatted helps in highlighting the structure and what is missing from it. While at it we also got some glitches with format-on-paste feature fixed. It’s a bit more complicated than you might think, as this issue might illustrate. Thanks Alexander Kouznetsov for the help in figuring this out!

• Closing/fixing incomplete structure is not new in Calva. It has been used for Calva’s commands for evaluating to the cursor from arbitrary deep before the cursor. Which is very handy for investigating the steps in threads with the REPL, and for including let bindings in what is evaluated. It has so far not been available for your custom REPL evaluation commands, which is now fixed with the $selection-closing-brackets interpolation variable.

• The Custom REPL Commands have been available only from Clojure files. This is now changed so that you can fire these commands from any file, as long as the REPL is connected. Good for Clerk Markdown Notebooks, which was the driver for this change.

• The command Expand Selection now considers binding pairs, making it easy to select key/value paris in maps or bindings in let boxes, etcetera.

• Stefan van den Oord fixed a long standing and mysterious issue we have had with the deps.edn + shadow-cljs REPL connect sequence. It turned out we didn’t handle the case of selecting multiple shadow-cljs launch builds. (This is correctly handled for the shadow-cljs sequence, making our suggestion to use this sequence instead work as a ”solution”.)

• Selecting a deps.edn alias that provides :main-opts can break Calva’s connection of the REPL, because calva provides its own main-opts to start the nREPL server. The warning message Calva used to put up worked to help users navigate around this, but it was also terribly confusing. Thanks to Dustin Getz and Sean Corfield for helping with finding a better Ux!

• Connecting a shadow-cljs REPL is now a more managed process than it used to be. I’m already noticing a drop in user support time for this. Freeing up you users and us Calva maintainers for higher level conversations. 😀

• Traditionally REPL connect sequences have been intended per workspace. Babashka changes this. To fire up a Babashka REPL often the built in sequence works fine, but if you want to start it in WSL… Now you can define these sequences both globally and locally. Starting Babashka in WSL and connecting VS Code is simplified with a sequence like this one defined in your User VS Code settings file:

  
    "calva.replConnectSequences": [
  
      {
  
        "name": "Bashbabka (WSL)",
  
        "projectType": "custom",
  
        "customJackInCommandLine": "bash -c 'bb --nrepl-server JACK-IN-NREPL-PORT'",
  
      },
  
    ],
  
  

• Actually, in order to support ^that^ sequence we also needed to add support for fully custom connect sequences. The "custom" project type is new since a few weeks.

• Calva Notebooks are a bit of a special take on notebooks in that we insist that any Clojure file can be a notebook. This has been more than a tiny bit hampered by that evaluating a notebook has also evaluated the Rich Comments in there… This is now fixed. You dare evaluate a Calva Notebook if you dare evaluate the file in its regular form.

• There were also numerous small fixes and things happening that I either skip mentioning here, or that I have forgotten about. 😀

• For a few days of this period I was fire fighting. My changes introduced regressions, and my fixes for the regressions introduced regressions. Nothing super major, but there is a promise we want to keep with Calva: We prioritize regressions that we introduce. As can be picked up in The Tao of Calva: Moving fast is great. Breaking things is fine, as long as you fix them fast.

Starter projects

I am a big fan of small starter projects. They can load a lot of experimentation and failure experience into a simple and approachable package that is easy for beginners and non-beginners alike to pick up and use. Hopefully for a quicker and smoother experience than the starter project creator had. Hereby I am encouraging you all to consider this when you have experimented with some tech stack, or tech stack component. It is my experience that I learn better from creating them as well. Both by the activity of structuring the project and writing the README in a way that I can hope is understandable, and from the feedback and contributions I get from others trying to use my project.

Anyway. This period around I created one new starter project and gave some love to an old and still popular one.

• Dockerized ClojureCLR Starter Project. Celebrating that ClojureCLR got a new nREPL server, and confirming that it works well with Calva, the result was a starter project. As I am on a Mac and don’t have reasons for having .Net installed, I choose to use Docker Compose to set the project up. This also makes it super quick to go from Zero to a ClojureCLR REPL running and connected to your editor. Special Calva convenience added. Please consider contributing configuration for your favorite Clojure IDE.

• rn-rf-shadow is a ClojureScript + Reagent + re-frame + React Native starter project, powered by shadow-cljs and Expo. It has helped a quite a few ClojureScript React Native projects to get started.

  • It is now up-to-date with latest React, latest Reagent, latest everything.

  • The dependency bumps were the result of me adding React Navigation to the project. This makes sense for a lot of projects and is easy enough to rip out if your project does not need it. There is now also a branch demonstrating how to use React Native libraries, in this case the react-native-countdown-timer (no README update for this yet).

Please follow me

• I’m @PEZ on Github.
• I’m @pappapez on Twitter.

Thanks for sponsoring me! ❤️

• Clojurists Together: This long term sponsoring is fantastic. It makes wonders for how I can fit open source contributions into my family life.
• Github Sponsors: Same here, it’s long term and it makes my family respect Clojure, Calva, Open Source and that I want to spend time with it.
  

Peter Taoussanis

You can read more from Peter at Peter Taoussanis

Recent releases include:

• Sente: v1.18.0 - see release notes for details
• Timbre: v6.2.1 - see release notes for details
• http-kit: v2.7.0 - see release notes for details

Upcoming work:

• Carmine v3.3.0-RC1 will be out in the first week of July. This includes a rewrite of Carmine’s message queue system, with major improvements in mq performance, observability, and documentation.
• Tempel v1.0.0-beta1 is still on track for end of August, more info on that closer the time.
• Moving forward, all my libraries will include testing for GraalVM when relevant. Thanks to Michiel Borkent for Babashka, and for his assistance with testing. As usual, my current open-source plan is available here.

A big thanks to Clojurists Together, Nubank, lambdaschmiede, and other sponsors of my open-source work 🙏

Q2 2023 Project Updates

Aleph/Manifold: Matthew Davidson

(Report 2. Published 30 June 2023)

HTTP/2 support

• Client-side HTTP/2 is now generally available, as of 0.7.0-alpha1
• H2C cleartext is now supported (use with caution)

Other Aleph changes

• Massive refactoring of Aleph internals
• Much better documented
• Split up pipelines for multiplex codec
• Added helper Java classes for channel initialization and ALPN negotiation
• Added pr support for Netty classes
  

Donut: Daniel Higginbotham

(Report 2 Published 25 May, 2023)
Over the last couple months I’ve made a lot of changes across the Donut ecosystem to get the framework closer to realizing the vision of providing a foundation for building single-page apps. I’ve focused on creating a cookie-based auth plugin that provides both backend API endpoints and frontend components.

Per-repo changes include:

donut-party/endpoint

This repo provides components you can add to your system to configure it for serving HTTP API requests.

• Added ServerComponent donut.system components
  This encapsulates a default configuration for running a jetty server
• Added HTTPComponentGroup donut.system component group and http-plugin plugin
  These make it possible for a developer to add a collection of donut.system components to their system with just a lien of code
• Improved docstrings

donut-party/endpoint-test

This repo provides a test harness for applications that use donut.system and donut.endpoint to define API handlers. It handles system setup/teardown and provides helpers to:

• Construct endpoint paths
• Send requests to your app’s request handler
• Parse responses back into Clojure data structures

Updates:

• Updated plugin definition to use latest syntax from donut.system I’d updated donut.system’s plugin syntax to be more readable and more data-oriented, and this required an update to donut.endpoint.test.harness/test-harness-plugin. The plugin provides some default configuration for the library’s helpers.
• Revised interface for request helpers
  I significantly rewrote the interface for request handlers to take a single argument, a map, rather than relying on variadic positional arguments. I found the positional arguments too difficult to remember and not as readable.
• Added a README
• Added support for edn content-type

donut-party/frontend

• Added support for auth responses The frontend framework can handle API responses structured to convey an auth token to the frontend, and store that token in the re-frame app db.

• Update XHR handling to add auth header when token present The frontend library has a lot of tools for performing XHR requests. I updated them to include an Authorization HTTP header when an auth token is present in the re-frame app db.

donut-party/donut-cli

• Updated project generator Updated the template used for new projects, and updated the CLI to use the updated templated.

donut-party/system

• Added dependency-pairs function
  This makes it easier to grok depedencies and put them in a graph
• Added ability to specify repl system
  Previously, the tools in donut.system.repl required you to use a named-system named :donut.system/repl. This change makes it possible to pass in the name of any named system and use that.
• Added namespace for visualizing the dep graph with visjs
  Calling (donut.view.visjs/show your-system) will open a browser window that uses visjs to show a dependency graph of your system.
• Added component caching
  Sometimes you don’t want to constantly stop and restart components. For example, you probably don’t want to stop and start a threadpool for every test. This addition lets you cache a component, preserving a component instance across stops and starts. Clearing the cache will make the component respond to the next stop signal.