clojerl VS rcf

Basically, you take a programming language and make it work on a platform that meant to be programmed using a different PL. Clojure is hosted by design - it's not Java, but can be used to program for JVM. It ain't Javascript, but can be used to target nodejs and browser; not an [official] CLR language, but you can write .Net programs. You can use Clojure to make Flutter apps with ClojureDart. You can integrate Python into Clojure with libpython-clj. Or write Clojure to target Erlang/OTP; or Rust; or R; There's even a clojure-like language for Lua - Fennel.

There's something about Clojure people like so much, they want it to work atop any platform.

https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS

https://github.com/scicloj/clojisr

https://fennel-lang.org

But there are also unofficial implementations—i.e. not JVM, JS, .NET—of Clojure for other host environments, e.g. Clojerl. And of course nearly everything /u/borkdude touches interops with something in some way.

Tail call optimization/elimination isn't a property of functional languages - there are tons of non-functional languages with it, like Lua or even C, when compiled with -O3, to name a few. Besides, Clojure is a hosted language, so it shares the platform characteristics, and recur is a language-way of providing a construct for tail call looping. Clojure on BEAM for example, supports tail call elimination, because BEAM does. And Beam is a quite functional environment ;)

Clojerl: an implementation for the Erlang VM. The reader conditional is :clje.

There's also an unofficial BEAM VM implementation

After doing some interactive development, I will occasionally reuse some of this example code and make it into actual, formalised tests in the test namespaces. Some people have started using the comment form for actual tests too, e.g. hyperfiddle/rcf or matthewdowney/rich-comment-tests.

Test lib is https://github.com/hyperfiddle/rcf, which had a release last week – the release is a noop from userland but has a bunch of infrastructure we need (RCF now implements the Clojure/Script analyzer to extend Clojure syntax so that (do x := y) is an async test assertion at any depth in the form.)

Not to make you feel too bad, but based on your sentence you may appreciate a recent addition to my personal REPL toolkit in Clojure which I very much enjoy.

You may remember the rich comment forms in Clojure development as a communication tool to your future self and others. Now someone made them testable https://github.com/hyperfiddle/rcf#readme

I use shadow-cljs server for both node and browser, the REPL is instant. There is some configuring though, you can probably get help in slack. (Shameless plug – JS has lots of async, to tame that at the REPL try https://github.com/hyperfiddle/rcf)

If you have concerns about the correctness of get-book-tags in isolation I would suggest https://github.com/hyperfiddle/rcf,

Based on https://github.com/hyperfiddle/rcf, a REPL-first test macro for Clojure/Script which turns your Rich Comment Forms into tests (in the same file as your functions). It's good, try it!