Notes.

I’m happy to be able to say that I joined Whimsical today! Thanks to everybody who helped during my job search. I had some really great conversations with companies using Clojure, and I’m excited to be diving back into Clojure programming full-time.

-main

• re:Clojure has announced their schedule and speakers for the 2021 conference. Lots of great names and talks, I’m particularly excited about Christoph Grand’s talk on Clojure for Dart.
• Fogus has a new Thunks repo, a place to think through and discuss ideas. The first set of notes are on core.async.
• Erik Assum talks about how he set up deploys to Clojars for clj-commons libraries based on a release tag.
• Clerk has now been released. It lets you turn a Clojure namespace into a notebook, but also lets you use your existing Clojure editor. Jack Rusher has a Twitter thread with some examples of how he’s using it.
• I talked with Renzo Borgatti about his book Clojure, The Essential Reference.
• Whimsical (my new employer, and a Clojurists Together member) has raised $30 million in funding.
• Nubank (also a Clojurists Together member, notice a pattern?) is targeting a $50 Billion valuation in an upcoming IPO.
• Maurício Szabo has a good article on solving ClojureScript performance problems by taking advantage of Clojure’s data orientation by collapsing DOM nodes.
• Sean Corfield has rebooted clojure-doc to a static site which can be regenerated from a new commit.
• Brian Goetz has a minute and a half endorsement of Clojure.

Libraries & Books.

• Jakub Holy has a new release out of clj-concordion, a library for writing Concordion tests.

Foundations.

• GraalVM 21.3 is out with support for Java 17 and a bunch of improvements to both the Community and Enterprise versions.
• Oracle has changed course and again will allow you to use the Oracle JDK for commercial use with no charge, starting with JDK 17 (Oracle’s OpenJDK builds are not affected by this change). There is a new Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions license that goes along with it, I’d recommend reading it carefully and understanding the implications if you’re going to switch.
• Here is an overview of GC changes in JDK 17, and a preview of a big improvement to G1 remembered set size coming in JDK 18.
• Java’s Project Loom is nearing a preview in the JDK.

  The JDK implements virtual threads by storing their state, including the stack, on the Java heap. Virtual threads are scheduled by a scheduler in the Java class libraries, whose worker threads mount virtual threads on their backs when the virtual threads are executing, thus becoming their carriers.

Tools.

• Cursive 1.12.0-eap1 is out and has support for tools.build, JetBrains Package Search, and better support for IntelliJ’s Code With Me feature.
• Asko Nõmm writes about using a beefy remote server to run a large Calva development environment.
• Making nREPL and CIDER More Dynamic from Lambda Island
• Exoscale has another take on multi-module deps.edn projects.

Recent Developments.

Along with the previously mentioned CLJ-2664, there are a number of nice “quality of life” interop improvements coming to the next version of Clojure.

• ClojureScript 1.10.891 was released. David Nolen wrote a good explanation of changes around implicit requires of Google Closure Library namespaces. It’s definitely worth taking the time to understand this and check your codebase for any uses of goog.object and similar that don’t have matching requires. Michiel Borkent has added a check for this in clj-kondo which will be available in the next release.
• CLJ-1925 is adding a random-uuid function to Clojure to match up with the function in ClojureScript. Rich has marked it as OK so it looks like it will be included in Clojure 1.11.
• CLJ-2667 adds functions to parse UUIDs, doubles, and longs from strings
• CLJ-2668 adds predicates for NaN? and infinite? to Clojure.

Learning

• Clojure Data Science is organising a number of the workshops at re:Clojure and a Data Science Special the next day. They’re looking for feedback on the Data Science Special.
• Macrobrew: Clojure macros distilled from Abhinav Omprakash.
• Mitchell Szczepanczyk gave a talk Researching “third way” democratically-run economies with Clojure(Script) to the Chicago Clojure meetup

I’m Daniel Compton. I maintain public Maven repositories at Clojars, private ones at Deps, and help fund OSS Clojure projects (along with tons of generous members like Latacora, Roam, Whimsical, Pitch, Nubank, Cisco, AppsFlyer, JUXT, Metosin, Solita, Adgoji, Nextjournal, Flexiana, Toyokumo, Griffin, and Parkside) at Clojurists Together. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, tell your friends to sign up at therepl.net, or post a link in your company chatroom. If you’ve seen (or published) a blog post, library, or anything else Clojure/JVM related please reply to this to let me know about it.

If you’d like to support the work that I’m doing, consider signing up for a trial of Deps, a private, hosted, Maven Repository service that I run.

Thanks!