Notes.
I’m writing this in the airport before leaving to go to Heart of Clojure. I’m really looking forward to meeting more Clojure people, there’s not many of us in New Zealand. I’ll be handing out Clojurists Together stickers, so come say hi!
-main
- ask.clojure.org is a new Q&A site for asking questions about Clojure. It looks like it has a broader scope than questions that would be allowed on StackOverflow, but perhaps has some overlap with Clojureverse. I’m really enjoying seeing the Clojure core team experiment with different ways of communicating and engaging with the community. The announcement also mentions that this will be the new way for starting a problem report for Clojure, triaged issues will then migrate to JIRA.
- If you enjoy a good old-fashioned bikeshed, then jump into this discussion about whether we should suffix names of boolean values with a question mark.
- The Java Language Summit was on recently, and Ghadi Shayban spoke there about Clojure and how it interfaces with the JVM.
- Jack Rusher talked about maria.cloud
- Roman Liutikov showed how we can use Project Loom fibers and continuations in Cloure and async/await in ClojureScript.
- JUXT has released a lot of things recently. If this keeps up I’ll need a separate section in this newsletter just for them. A Crux dev diary and new Crux tutorials are out. They have also released a new podcast out, and immediately touched the third rail, discussing whether a company should mandate a single editor for their developers. If that wasn’t enough, they are also putting on another conference: XT20.
- CircleCI recently announced they raised their series D round, bringing their total investment to $111.5MM. I think this is the most that any Clojure company has raised, Climate Corp raised $107MM.
- I talked with Eric Normand about teaching Clojure, and some of his new courses on The REPL podcast.
Libraries & Books.
- Chris Nuernberger continues his dark magic, this time calling into Python from Clojure with libpython-clj. This was discussed on the most recent scicloj meeting.
- panthera uses libpython-clj to work with Pandas dataframes from Clojure.
Foundations.
- JDK 13 is in early access, and is scheduled for release in September 17, 2019. A few things I noticed which might affect Clojure users: the Socket API is being reimplemented, and there are some improvements to application class-data-sharing.
- Amazon has released Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider which provides an optimized version of many cryptographic algorithms on the JDK. If you do any cryptography in your Java code (including TLS termination) it seems worth checking out. There are some impressive looking charts on the blog post.
- This was a really well written article on the stack in Java, how stack overflows are detected, and some recent changes in JDK9 around the stack to make locking code safer.
Recent Developments.
- Alex Miller talks more about ask.clojure.org, tools.deps, and spec.
- Performance improvements to ClojureScript from Mike Fikes continue to come, this time in source map creation.
- CLJ-2075 would add three-arities to a bunch of equality and inequality operators, for a fairly significant speedup.
Learning
Misc.
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 Pitch, Nubank, JUXT, Metosin, Adgoji, and Funding Circle) 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!
