OSS updates March 2023

In this post I'll give updates about open source I worked on during March 2023.

Sponsors

But first off, I'd like to thank all the sponsors and contributors that make this work possible! Top sponsors:

• Clojurists Together
• Roam Research
• Nextjournal
• Toyokumo
• Cognitect
• Kepler16
• Adgoji

If you want to ensure that the projects I work on are sustainably maintained, you can sponsor this work in the following ways. Thank you!

• Github Sponsors
• The Babaska or Clj-kondo OpenCollective
• Ko-fi
• Patreon
• Clojurists Together

If you're used to sponsoring through some other means which isn't listed above, please get in touch.

On to the projects that I've been working on!

cherry

Experimental ClojureScript to ES6 module compiler

This month I've been preparing cherry as a compiler that you can embed in your existing CLJS / shadow-cljs applications. This makes cherry an additional alternative to SCI and self-hosted CLJS.

Read about embedding cherry into your application here.

I've been working on several PRs to include cherry as an additional evaluator in:

• clerk
• malli
• One project that is still unpublished but will be coming soon!

scimacs

The Small Clojure Interpreter (SCI) integrated with emacs as a loadable module.

This is a new project by Jack Rusher and I've helped him with the SCI integration.

clj2el

Transpile clojure to elisp. A brand new project to transpile Clojure to Elisp. It might be of value for those who know Clojure better than Elisp and want to have something to get started. It's far from complete. Try it in the playground here.

deflet

Make let-expressions REPL-friendly!

The deflet macro lets your write inline-def expressions, while expanding those to regular let expressions, giving you the benefits of REPL-driven development without polluting production code with top level vars.

babashka

Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting

New release: 1.3.175 (2023-03-18)), 1.3.176 (2023-03-18)

Highlights:

The clojure.core.async/go macro now uses virtual threads.

Many small fixes and upgrades.

See the complete CHANGELOG.

babashka.json

This is a JSON abstraction library that you can include in babashka and JVM projects while also including your own favorite JSON implementation. The idea is that babashka libraries can include this, while JVM projects don't have to switch their JSON implementation to cheshire.core.

Babashka compatibility in external libs

I worked together with the maintainers of the following libraries to make them compatible with babashka:

• martian: HTTP abstraction library for Clojure/script, supporting OpenAPI, Swagger, Schema, re-frame and more

clj-kondo

Static analyzer and linter for Clojure code that sparks joy

New release: 2023.03.17

Some highlights:

• #2010: Support inline macro configuration. See docs
• #2010: Short syntax to disable linters: {:ignore [:unresolved-symbol]} or {:ignore true}, valid in ns-metadata, :config-in-ns, :config-in-call
• #2009: new :var-same-name-except-case linter: warn when vars have names that differ only in case (important for AOT compilation and case-insensitive filesystems)
• #1269: warn on :jvm-opts in top level of deps.edn
• #2003: detect invalid arity call for function passed to update, update-in, swap!, swap-vals!, send, send-off, and send-via

Check the changelog for details.

SCI

Configurable Clojure/Script interpreter suitable for scripting and Clojure DSLs

New release: 0.7.39 (2023-03-07)

• #874: Keyword arguments as map support for CLJS

See changelog for more.

Contributions to other projects

• clojurescript:
  • PR 202: a macroexpand fix
  • PR 203: a symbol optimization fix
• clojure-lsp: fix reflection issue on JDK 19
• http-kit: add native-image tests
• promesa: fix GraalVM native-image compilation
• etaoin: JDK 19 + babashka issue

Brief mentions

The following projects also got updates, mostly in the form of maintenance and performance improvements. This post would get too long if I had to go into detail about them, so I'll briefly mention them in random order:

• CLI: Turn Clojure functions into CLIs!
• quickdoc: Quick and minimal API doc generation for Clojure
• rewrite-clj: Rewrite Clojure code and edn
• sql pods: babashka pods for SQL databases
• squint: CLJS syntax to JS compiler
• pod-babashka-buddy: A pod around buddy core (Cryptographic Api for Clojure).
• gh-release-artifact: Upload artifacts to Github releases idempotently
• edamame: Configurable EDN/Clojure parser with location metadata
• Nbb: Scripting in Clojure on Node.js using SCI
• neil: A CLI to add common aliases and features to deps.edn-based projects
• jet: CLI to transform between JSON, EDN, YAML and Transit using Clojure
• http-client: Babashka's http-client

Other projects

These are (some of the) other projects I'm involved with but little to no activity happened in the past month.

• cljs-showcase: Showcase CLJS libs using SCI
• carve - Remove unused Clojure vars
• deps.clj: A faithful port of the clojure CLI bash script to Clojure
• grasp: Grep Clojure code using clojure.spec regexes
• scittle: Execute Clojure(Script) directly from browser script tags via SCI
• quickblog: Light-weight static blog engine for Clojure and babashka
• sci.configs: A collection of ready to be used SCI configs
• lein2deps: leiningen to deps.edn converter
• 4ever-clojure - Pure CLJS version of 4clojure, meant to run forever!
• instaparse-bb
• fs - File system utility library for Clojure
• process: Clojure library for shelling out / spawning sub-processes
• pod-babashka-lanterna: Interact with clojure-lanterna from babashka
• joyride: VSCode CLJS scripting and REPL (via SCI)

Published: 2023-04-07

Tagged: clojure oss updates