February 2023 Report: Updates for 2022 Projects

By Kathy Davis

Greetings Clojurists Together community! Read the latest updates for the following 2022 projects: Clj-kondo, ClojureDart, Kaocha, and Practicalli.

2022 Q1 Project

Project Practicalli: John Stevenson

A range of updates, new content and tool reviews and testing. Reviewed 75 solutions for 44 students on Exercism.io over the last two week, adding that advice and code walk-throughs to the Practicalli Clojure book. \

General tasks

Practicalli Clojure Web Services

Contributions to other projects

Practicalli Neovim

Created a fennel based configuration for Cloure development with Neovim, with a focus on REPL driven dvelopment, using LSP and as distraction free as possible.
All configuration written in fennel, except for a smal lua file to boostrap aniseed fennel to lua compiler.
Started a book to help use Neovim and the Practicall/neovim-config for those new to Neovim (and vim)

Practicalli Clojure

Practicalli Clojure Web Services

Practicall Spacemacs

LSP completion testing shows inconsistent completion on aliases for required libraries

Blog posts

Updates

Miscellaneous

2022 Q3 Projects

Project Clj-kondo: Michiel Borkent (Jan. 2023 Update)

In this post, I’ll give updates about open source I worked on during January 2023.

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

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!

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

Attention

If you are using Github Sponsors and are making payments via Paypal, please update to a creditcard since Github Sponsors won’t support Paypal after February 23rd 2023. Read their statement here. If you are not able to pay via a creditcard, you can still sponsor me via one of the ways mentioned above.

Babashka

Native, fast-starting Clojure interpreter for scripting. New releases in the past month: 1.0.170 - 1.1.173 Highlights:

Babashka compatibility in external libs

I contributed changes to the following libraries to make them compatible with babashka:

Http-client

The new babashka http-client project mostly replaces babashka.curl. This month the default client was improved to accept gzip and deflate as encodings by default, reflecting what babashka.curl did. Also babashka.http-client is now available as a built-in namespace in babashka v1.1.171 and higher.

Clj-kondo

Static analyzer and linter for Clojure code that sparks joy. Three new releases with many fixes and improvements in the last month. Check the changelog for details. Some highlights:

Instaparse-bb

This is a new project and gives you access to a subset of instaparse via a pod. Instaparse was request a few times to have as a library in babashka and instaparse-bb is a good first step, without making a decision on that yet. See the relevant discussion here.

Carve

Remove unused Clojure vars. In the 0.3.5 version, Carve got the following updates:

Jet

CLI to transform between JSON, EDN, YAML and Transit using Clojure Version 0.4.23:

Fs

File system utility library for Clojure. Fs has gotten a few new functions:

See changelog for more details.

Neil

A CLI to add common aliases and features to deps.edn-based projects. This month there were several small fixes, one of them being to always pick stable versions when adding or upgrading libraries. See full changelog for details.

Quickblog

Light-weight static blog engine for Clojure and babashka. The blog you’re currently reading is made with quickblog. Version 0.2.3 was released with contributions from several people, mostly enabling you to tweak your own blog even more, while having good defaults. Instances of quickblog can be seen here:

If you are also using quickblog, please let me know! A collection of ready to be used SCI configs for e.g. Reagent, Promesa, Re-frame and other projects that are used in nbb, joyride, scittle, etc. See recent commits for what’s been improved.

Edamame

Edamame got a new function: parse-next+string which returns the original string along with the parsed s-expression.

lein2deps

4ever-clojure

I added the ability to build and deploy 4ever-clojure to Github Actions. Every time a commit is merged, the site is automatically updated.

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:

Discuss this post here. Published: 2023-02-05 Tagged: clojure oss updates


Project Clj-kondo: Michiel Borkent (Feb. 2023 Update)

In this post, I’ll give updates about open source I worked on during February 2023.

Babashka

Native, fast-starting Clojure interpreter for scripting. New release: 1.2.174. Highlights:

Babashka compatibility in external libs I worked together with the maintainers of the following libraries to make them compatible with babashka:

Http-client: Babashka’s http-client

Clj-kondo

Static analyzer and linter for Clojure code that sparks joy. New release: 2023.02.17. Some highlights:

SCI

Configurable Clojure/Script interpreter suitable for scripting and Clojure DSLs. This month:

Fs

File system utility library for Clojure. Highlights:

Process

Clojure library for shelling out / spawning sub-processes This month I looked into wrapping output of processes with a prefix so when ran in parallel, you can easily distuingish them. A preliminary solution is in this thread.

Pod-babashka-lanterna

Interact with clojure-lanterna from babashka. A very experimental 0.0.1 release was published. You can try it out by playing tetris in the console with babashka:

bb -Sdeps ‘{:deps {io.github.borkdude/console-tetris {:git/sha “2d3bee34ea93c84608c7cc5994ae70480b2df54c”}}}’ -m tetris.core

Nbb

Scripting in Clojure on Node.js using SCI Finally nbb has gotten support for passing maps to keyword argument functions:

Several other improvements have been made in the area of macros and resolving JS library references and resolving dependencies in an nbb.edn file, relative to an invoked script which is not in the current directory. See changelogs here.

Joyride

VSCode CLJS scripting and REPL (via SCI) This month I contributed a built-in version of rewrite-clj to joyride, so joyriders can rewrite their code from within VSCode.

Cljs-showcase

Showcase CLJS libs using SCI A little project to show how you can use SCI to showcare your CLJS library in an interactive way.

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:

Other Projects

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

Discuss this post here. Published: 2023-03-01 Tagged: clojure oss updates


Project ClojureDart: Christophe Grand

This final update covers January 2023. This month we merged our changes for a better hot reload (see Update #2) and then went on bug fixing and doing small improvements for a while.

A problem kept bothering us: in our cljd.flutter (well in January it was stillcljd.flutter.alpha2) we have :watch to react to updates to all kind of stateful objects and sub to narrow the scope of changes we are interested in for a given “watchable”. This is very useful as it allows to change the frequency at which a piece of UI is updated: one can have a big atom holding a lot of state (and this changing frequently) and watch a slower changing subset of it.

However sub only allowed to narrow one watchable. This led to awkward code were every other watchables (IO or framework related) updates had to be shoe-horned in a single canonical atom with the help of listeners (whose lifecycles have to be tied to specific parts of the widget tree) and hair-pulling naming decisions on paths inside this atom.

We first extended sub to allow to apply a function across several watchables latest values, somehow behaving like a join. It worked but felt quite stiff and not very pleasing to use. sub relied on the f & args update convention (as used in swap!, update-in etc.) but there’s no agreed upon convention for when one has several input and thus it doesn’t mesh as well as the single-input version with the core lib.

This dissatisfaction led us to develop “cells”. Cells as in spreadsheets. So cells are expressions which recompute their value when their dependencies values change. Obviously we made cells watchable. A cell is defined by using the $ macro (because it caches its latest value) and inside (dynamically, not lexically) a cell one can take (<!) from other cell or any other watchable.

Example: assuming now is an atom (a plain old one) updated at 60fps, then ($ (.-day (<! now))) is a cell recomputed at 60fps but yielding a new value once a day. So any widget (or other cell) depending on this cell will only be updated once a day.

This generalizes nicely to multiple dependencies and even to dynamic dependency graphs. Another interesting fact to know about cells is that a cell is recomputed only when it’s watched (and this cascades transitively: an unwatched cell doesn’t watch its dependencies…). Another consequence of cells is that the push for a single big canonical atom goes away.

This changed positively the way we write apps. So much that in our February workshop we talked only about cells, not subs.


Project Kaocha: Arne Brasseur (Dec. 2022 Update)

Dec. 2022 Update:

Facai 0.8.68-alpha (2022-12-16 / 1f31590)

Glogi 1.2.164 (2022-11-25 / 9a89583)

Deep-diff2 2.6.166 (2022-11-25 / 06fec7e)

Clj-diff 1.4.78 (2022-11-25 / 2c3cae0)

Kaocha-cljs2 0.1.58 (2022-11-11 / 98fdc42)

Kaocha-junit-xml 1.17.101 (2022-11-09 / 95067b2)

Kaocha-cloverage 1.1.89 (2022-11-09 / c2b2dbf)

Kaocha 1.71.1119 (2022-10-24 / 4317878)


Project Kaocha: Arne Brasseur (Jan. and Feb. 2023 Update)

Jan. and Feb. 2023 Update: After a refreshing break, we’ve hit the ground running in 2023, merging approximately 20 PRs from both Gaiwan and community contributors, fixing many bugs and some CI/cljdocs issues. Several new libraries support Babashka, including Kaocha. We hope this and other efforts will expand the pool of Clojure libraries and tools available for use in Babashka. Most of the focus has been on Kaocha, which saw eight separate releases over the past two months. We’ve also released minor updates for Launchpad, embedkit, and Deja-fu.

Kaocha 1.79.1270 (2023-02-28 / 47a7b61)

Launchpad 0.15.79-alpha (2023-01-20 / 2b06d8e)

Embedkit 0.0.50 (2023-01-19 / 8e058ff)

Deja-fu 1.4.58 (2023-01-16 / 1446eef)