Clojurescripting

After seeing the announcement for ClojureScript’s self-hosting feature and planck, I kept wondering whether one couldn’t have the same on your typical GNU/Linux machine. Turns out it is possible thanks to the cljs-bootstrap project!

I’ve initially tried building it from source, but as the standalone file produced by the Closure compiler wasn’t functional, I went for the lazy route instead:

npm install -g cljs-repl
npm install -g source-map-support

Installing source-map-support is not required, but still done to avoid the Could not load source-map support error. Most likely a missing dependency…

If you’ve configured npm correctly, you’ll have access to a cljs executable now. It appears to be functional:

cljs.user=> (+ 1 1)
2

Now for the scripting part. You can either pipe code into the cljs executable or pass an extra argument that’s interpreted as a file to read code from. What’s less obvious is that the code must be a single form, otherwise it will result in an incomprehensible error…

With this knowledge, I was able to rewrite the following:

require('process');

process.stdin.setEncoding('utf8');
process.stdin.on('data', function(data) {
    process.stdout.write(data);
})

To something more lispy:

(do
  (js/require "process")

  (.setEncoding js/process.stdin "utf8")
  (.on js/process.stdin "data"
       (fn [data]
         (.write js/process.stdout data))))

I’m sort of underwhelmed. While you can get pretty far, anything outside the realm of manipulating data structures will require interop, be it with what Node.js provides directly or one of the numerous modules out there. You can of course write your own libraries for more idiomatic access to commonly used functionality, but that again would require tooling to be easily usable.

Maybe I should reconsider doing my own take on Clojure based on my Emacs Lisp MAL implementation. Doing that would be incredibly pointless, but then I’d finally know how my ideal scripting language would look like. Alternatively, I could just stay with CHICKEN and contribute some more eggs…