clojure VS Graal

5. Clojure - $96,381

I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://clojure.org/

I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.

As an analogy - my face hasn't changed all that much in a past few years, and I haven't changed my profile picture in those few years. Does it really mean that I'm unmaintained/dead?

> Where can I find latest documentation [...]?

The answer is still https://clojure.org/. And https://clojuredocs.org/ but it's community-maintained so might occasionally be missing some things right after they're released. E.g. as of this moment Clojure 1.11 is still not there since the maintainer of the website has some technical issues deploying the updated version of the website.

For me personally, the best API-level documentation is the source code.

> Where can I find [...] tools / libraries in a easy to use page or section?

There's no central repository of all the available things since they can be loaded from many places (Clojars, Maven Central, other Maven repositories, S3, Git, local files).

But there are community-maintained lists, like the one you've mentioned at https://www.clojure-toolbox.com (fully manual, AFAIK) or the one at https://phronmophobic.github.io/dewey/search.html (automated but only for GitHub). Perhaps there are others but I'm not familiar with them - most of the time, I myself don't find that much value in such services as I'm usually able to find things with a regular web search engine or ask the community when I need something in particular.

They are written in Java, and implement a bunch of interfaces, so the implementation looks complicated, but they are basically just classes with head and tail fields.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju...

Like this.

As a Java/Scala user you should check out Clojure! It is highly recommended (https://clojure.org)

Lisp is not a programming language, but a family of languages ​​with many dialects. The most famous dialects include Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme and Racket. So after deciding that I was going to learn Lisp, I had to choose one of its dialects.

I learned Clojure to implement a plugin for Metabase (the tool my former company used for creating business dashboards). I probably won’t ever use the language anymore in the future, but learning functional programming was fun and eye-opening.

I thought you might be trolling. But then when I looked at the Clojure repo on Github https://github.com/clojure/clojure the last commit was 2 months back. There is some merit in your arguments.

Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

https://github.com/oracle/graal

Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.

Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

> to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182