Immer Alternatives

immer reviews and mentions

• immer: Postmodern immutable and persistent data structures for C++
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2022
• The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2022

  jank is currently using immer for persistent data structures: https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

  Very much inspired by Clojure, with a lot of time put into benchmarking and profiling.

  It's too early for me to share numbers on jank vs Clojure itself, especially due to the rewrite, but my earlier jank versions were definitely competitive with AOT compiled Clojure jars.

• Image undo/redo implementation
  3 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 19 May 2022

  An alternate method: use an immutable vector from immer to store the pixels. This works like git. Instead of modifying the image in place, immer will give you a new vector with the changes made. The immutable vector is implemented to make this efficient.

  3 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 19 May 2022

  I would actually recommend to use something like immer. It will probably suit your needs quite well. Have a look at the talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q he implements a text editor with undo/redo based on it and it could be what your looking for https://github.com/arximboldi/immer .

• The Lisp Curse
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2022

  I like working in C++, after a decade of working in Java, Python, Javascript and Clojure, I find working in C++ (which I learned before these other languages) to be quite fun and pleasant, at least with relatively modern C++.

  I've been, on and off, working on a little toy game engine, for a few years. Its a mix of keeping up with C++ advancements, learning various concepts like physically based rendering, and just the fun of crafting a big project, with no constraints other than my time and ability, no deadlines, no expectation of releasing anything. Its cathartic and enjoyable. I really do enjoy it.

  Last September, I got frustrated with something I was working on in a more serious capacity. It was some server software, it responded to HTTP requests, it accessed third party services over HTTP and Websockets, it talked to a Postgres database. Overall it was an event driven system that transformed data and generated actions that would be applied by talking to third party services. The "real" version was written in Clojure and it worked pretty well. I really like Clojure, so all good.

  But because I was frustrated with some things about how it ran and the resources it took up, I wondered what it would be like if I developed a little lean-and-mean version in C++. So I gave it a try as a side project for a few weeks. I used doctest[1] for testing, immer[2] for Clojure-like immutable data structures, [3] lager for Elm-like application state and logic management, Crow[4] for my HTTP server, ASIO[5] and websocketpp[6] for Websockets, cpp-httplib[7] as a HTTP client and PGFE[8] for Postgres, amongst some other little utility libraries. I also wrote it in a Literate Programming style using Entangled[9], which helped me keep everything well documented and explained.

  For the most part, it worked pretty well. Using immer and lager helped keep the logic safe and to the point. The application started and ran very quickly and used very little cpu or memory. However, as the complexity grew, especially when using template heavy libraries like lager, or dealing with complex things like ASIO, it became very frustrating to deal with errors. Template errors even on clang became incomprehensible and segmentation faults when something wasn't quite right became pretty hard to diagnose. I had neither of these problems working on my game engine, but both became issues on this experiment. After a few weeks, I gave up on it. I do think I could have made it work and definitely could go back and simplify some of the decisions I made to make it more manageable, but ultimately, it was more work than I had free time to dedicate to it.

  So my experience was that, yes, you can write high level application logic for HTTP web backends in C++. You can even use tools like immer or lager to make it feel very functional-programming in style and make the application logic really clean. Its not hard to make it run efficiently both in terms of running time and memory usage, certainly when comparing to Clojure or Python. However, I found that over all, it just wasn't as easy or productive as either of those languages and I spent more time fighting the language deficiencies, even with modern C++, than I do when using Clojure or Python.

  I think I would think very long and hard before seriously considering writing a web backend in C++. If I had the time, I'd love to retry the experiment but using Rust, to see how it compares.

  [1] https://github.com/doctest/doctest

  [2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

  [3] https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

  [4] https://github.com/CrowCpp/crow

  [5] https://think-async.com/Asio/

  [6] https://www.zaphoyd.com/projects/websocketpp/

  [7] https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

  [8] https://github.com/dmitigr/pgfe

  [9] https://entangled.github.io/

• Tcl/Tk Spline Editor
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2022

  Hah, that's really nice! I've been working on an editor for setting up Box2D scenes for the last month or so. I know there are a bunch of them out there already, but it seemed like a fun project. No Tcl/Tk for me though. I'm writing it as a web app, but in C++ with wasm/webgl and using NanoVG[1] for drawing.

  I saw a comment here about undo/redo and I think it's a must have feature for something like this. I implemented something based on the command pattern first, but ended up disliking the amount of code needed just for undo. I eventually tore all that out and built my state model on the excellent immer[2] library.

  [1] https://github.com/inniyah/nanovg

  [2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

• Joker
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Sep 2021
• New in Git: switch and restore
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/programming | 1 Aug 2021

  This is why if you look at libraries like Immer they are based around reference counting and shared ownership.

• Six years of professional Clojure development
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2021

  I've been using Clojure since the summer of 2009, started a startup with it, using it exclusively on one project right now... and I agree about static types. I love many many things about Clojure, its my favourite language to use and I find it very well designed over all. But proper first class static types are the one thing I wish it had.

  My dream programming language is basically a statically typed Clojure.

  I've on and off poked at trying to make something like that (parsed using instaparse, type checked in Clojure, compiled to C++ using https://github.com/arximboldi/immer for the data structures), but haven't had the time to really get anywhere with it. Plus, even if I succeeded, I wouldn't have the rich Clojure (and by extension, Java and Javascript) ecosystem.

• Ask HN: Should I learn C++ in 2021?
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2021

  C++ is vast and diverse, but if you have interest in functional programming you may actually end up enjoying C++, since thanks to it's value types and it's imperfect albeit powerful type system (it's a bit like a compile-time dynamic typing, allowing interesting translation of Lispy patterns). I'm actually on a mission to build a solid ecosystem of functional and value-oriented tools for C++ and interactive software, some of which are used by big companies like Google:

  https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

  https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

  https://github.com/arximboldi/zug

  Also, I very agree with what @jasode has said. C++ will be interesting for you if you can do interesting things in C++. That is the main reason I use it: there are certain domains where I work: professional music software, graphics, film, robotics, etc. where there are no solid alternatives (maybe Rust/Nim/Zig if you are very adventurous). This kind of software is actually really cool, it's creative and enhances artists's lives and does not live in magical "clouds" but runs on your machine. The language is imperfect and complicated but working in these domains is really cool and it makes the experience of taming the beast of C++ enjoyable :)

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