6 ms·

Waitin' (on Leiningen)

129 points by mikeflynn 12y ago

garrettdreyfus 12y ago
I would just like to thank Swannodette for all the amazing work he has done for Clojure and its community. You are the best.
- pandeiro 12y ago
  +1 Besides being a prolific coder, he's a great writer with a knack for bridging the academic and the practical. What's more, the Clojure community has a great number of similarly education-minded and highly talented and effective programmers.
rcarmo 12y ago
I wish leiningen wouldn't take so long to run. The only real trouble with Clojure is how unbearably _slow_ the tools are. I can deal with the runtime taking its time to get going (mostly), but the tooling...
- pkhagah 12y ago
  I rarely start/stop the repl. I have one running for weeks. And incremental testing or updates in browser(figwheel) is all sub-second.
  - kjjw 12y ago
    Same here. No problem at all if a command I run once a week per project takes a few seconds. I can't imagine coding in clojure without leiningen. It stops me from having to deal with a tonne of complexity I really don't want to think about. As for cljsbuild, I'm guessing this is more a clojurescript compiler issue since again, I run leiningen once and leave it to recompile on file change in the background. Yes would be nice to have some compiler speed improvements but really it isn't that bad. I wait a second or two, not tens of seconds. At least, this is the case for me but then my cljs projects tend too be a couple of thousand lines at most.
- swannodette 12y ago
  It's not my experience that Clojure tooling is fundamentally slow, Leiningen is just one option. For many projects I don't use anything more than Maven bash scripts, inf-clojure, and clojure-mode - all overhead free. And projects like CursiveClojure drive home how powerful and responsive tooling for Clojure(Script) can be. Even so the point of the post is not to bash on Leiningen but to demonstrate how the overhead issues are not insurmountable - it just requires really knowing the tools (surprise) and which knobs to turn. In fact an implicit free idea for someone to explore is to automate all the optimizations for Leiningen that I covered.
- TylerE 12y ago
  That's not even a Clojure thing really. That's been the Achille's Heal of every interactive java app ever.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Only for those that inside in using only the OpenJDK. There are JVMs with JIT caches and AOT compilers. Even the reference JDK can start in a few ms using tiered compilation.
  - kyllo 12y ago
    Hence the need for: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/SplashScreen.html http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/SplashScre...
daxfohl 12y ago
Way to kick a guy when he's down. Next thing you know he'll be relegated to selling half-finished keyboards out of Thailand.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  What does this even mean?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - rads 12y ago
      It's a joke, people. Among the other things he's doing in Thailand, he actually is selling keyboards and seems to be quite content with his situation: http://technomancy.us/177 http://technomancy.us/177
  - pbiggar 12y ago
    technomancy, the author of leiningen, is moving to Thailand and has a side-business of selling keyboards. See http://technomancy.us/177 http://technomancy.us/177
programminggeek 12y ago
As cool of a language as clojure might be, bad tooling is bad UX. Bad UX makes for a bad product. I don't care how many amazing features a language has, without great tools, it sucks. PHP is a terrible language in terms of design, but deploys are ridiculously easy, and refreshing a page is near instantaneous. There are plenty of other things to complain about with PHP, but part of its popularity is the relatively pleasant experience with the main tools.
- mod 12y ago
  It'll get better, but I don't disagree. I started using Django, as a relative newbie to python, back in 0.96, and it was a real pain in the ass to deploy. It took me a couple of days, minimum, all the while knowing I could have things halfway done in PHP. Luckily I was given a stellar recommendation, and I stuck with it. Django deploys now? Incredibly easy on the hosts I use (DO / Heroku). I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so. FWIW, I'm just starting to learn clojure. And just barely starting--these problems aren't annoying me yet.
  - weavejester 12y ago
    > I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so. I'd say it was there years ago. On Heroku you can deploy any Clojure project that specifies a ":main" namespace. Deploying Clojure to a VPN is no different to any other language that runs behind an nginx proxy.
- swannodette 12y ago
  Extrapolating from the post that Clojure tooling is bad seems like a strange conclusion. I'm actually surprised that such a narrow post would find this much interest on HN. Clojure deploys are pretty ridiculously easy - and refreshing pages on a Clojure based web stack is also instantaneous. Seriously, Leiningen is great tooling. On pretty much every axis except startup speed I prefer it to everything else I've needed to use for work in other languages (Python, Ruby, and Node.js).
  - phren0logy 12y ago
bachback 12y ago
Leining is a very useful tool. Starting up Clojure indeed is noticeable. I wonder how much of the performance is due to Maven, and if gradle would do better. Gradle is a newer project with a custom DSL based on Groovy.
- wtetzner 12y ago
  Not sure what you mean? Leiningen is its own build tool, it isn't using Maven. I believe it uses the aether library for dependency management, but as far as I know that's all they have in common.
  - robert_tweed 12y ago
    Leiningen uses Maven for everything internally, it just goes to some effort to hide it most of the time.
    - weavejester 12y ago
      No it doesn't. I don't know why people think this.
      - kyllo 12y ago
        Because it interoperates with Maven. It can fetch and install code from Maven repositories, can read and write a pom.xml file, and uses the same groupId/artifactId/version format for specifying dependencies. And it also depends on a few org.apache.maven packages. So without looking at the source it would be easy to mistake lein for a Clojure wrapper around mvn. But it's more like a Clojure implementation of a superset of Maven's functionality, I guess.
        robert_tweed 12y ago
        You and I are definitely both correct about it being a dependency: it caused me some installation headaches. I may have misunderstood the docs about how deep of a dependency it is; I haven't read the source. Returning to the OP's point, given that it is a dependency, it's still possible there is some resulting startup overhead, but I couldn't say for sure without profiling it.
htor 12y ago
Nice! Never occurred to me to compile ClojureScript itself.
kcorbitt 12y ago
It probably isn't the same issue that is causing the Leiningen slowdown, but as near as I can tell the really slow startup time is the main reason Clojure on Android isn't currently a viable option. Which is too bad, because I'd love to see the Clojure community's take on Android development. I can imagine a UI framework spiritually similar to Facebook's ReactJS appearing and making everything so much cleaner. And with a Lisp like Clojure there would no longer be any reason to use XML for layout and Java for logic -- it could all be unified into one cohesive language. Maybe I'm dreaming too big, but that would be an exciting future.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Clojure is too slow, because of the vars creation that it does on startup. Work is ongoing to improve the situation for Clojure 1.7, but apparently the slowness won't go fully away. There as a post a few weeks ago on the mailing list about using ClojureScript instead, with compilation to Java bytecodes via Nashorn, before feeding the class files to Dalvik/ART. All of this is just too hacky for me. I would rather have a strong typed Clojure instead that wouldn't suffer from these pain points.
reitzensteinm 12y ago
I'd be careful about introducing more caching to the ClojureScript build process - I've been getting some really strange errors occasionally, the kind that leave garbled errors in the js that the source maps can't decypher, that disappear after a full clean & rebuild. I just released a site based on Clojure + Clojurescript, with the front end written in Reagent, and it was a pretty good experience overall. The above was my main issue with the setup. I've written more about the experience here (it seems there's not much interest in the site here, but at least the writeup should be interesting to those reading this post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791129 (Edit: it has since got a few upvotes, only to be killed by I guess the voting ring detection. C'est la vie.)
- swannodette 12y ago
  The issues you encountered likely arise from not recompiling dependent namespaces when you change a source file. It's something we'll probably address soon.
  - reitzensteinm 12y ago
    Ah, interesting. This was both with the advanced and no optimisations, if that matters? My overall impression was that ClojureScript was already 90% the way there, so you've done a damn fine job of maintaining and pushing the project forward. Thank you very much for that!
grandalf 12y ago
This is great progress. I anticipate that fairly soon javascript will become the dominant compile target / runtime for clojure.
retrogradeorbit 12y ago
Hmmm. I bumped my clojurescript to 0.0-2511, and I get the following: $ lein trampoline run -m clojure.main Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not locate cljsbuild/compiler__init.class or cljsbuild/compiler.clj on classpath: , compiling:(.../target/66ddb53f4f237c7eb26e49c2637097e7cd8567d9-init.clj:1:4) ... Everything else works fine. Do we have a more complete example project that I can check mine against?
- huahaiy 12y ago
  I got the same error. Seems to be relevant to this issue: https://github.com/emezeske/lein-cljsbuild/issues/204 https://github.com/emezeske/lein-cljsbuild/issues/204 The suggestion seems to be "In the meantime: don't use trampoline, or chain the task explicitly, before the trampoline, e.g. lein do cljsbuild once, trampoline repl."
nightwolf 12y ago
It's not actually that JVM startup time is slow, it's Clojure startup time in particular. See: https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-startup.html https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-star... And the other articles here: https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/ https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/

129 points by mikeflynn 12y ago

I would just like to thank Swannodette for all the amazing work he has done for Clojure and its community. You are the best.

pandeiro 12y ago
+1 Besides being a prolific coder, he's a great writer with a knack for bridging the academic and the practical. What's more, the Clojure community has a great number of similarly education-minded and highly talented and effective programmers.

rcarmo 12y ago

I wish leiningen wouldn't take so long to run. The only real trouble with Clojure is how unbearably _slow_ the tools are. I can deal with the runtime taking its time to get going (mostly), but the tooling...

pkhagah 12y ago
I rarely start/stop the repl. I have one running for weeks. And incremental testing or updates in browser(figwheel) is all sub-second.
- kjjw 12y ago
  Same here. No problem at all if a command I run once a week per project takes a few seconds. I can't imagine coding in clojure without leiningen. It stops me from having to deal with a tonne of complexity I really don't want to think about. As for cljsbuild, I'm guessing this is more a clojurescript compiler issue since again, I run leiningen once and leave it to recompile on file change in the background. Yes would be nice to have some compiler speed improvements but really it isn't that bad. I wait a second or two, not tens of seconds. At least, this is the case for me but then my cljs projects tend too be a couple of thousand lines at most.
swannodette 12y ago
It's not my experience that Clojure tooling is fundamentally slow, Leiningen is just one option. For many projects I don't use anything more than Maven bash scripts, inf-clojure, and clojure-mode - all overhead free. And projects like CursiveClojure drive home how powerful and responsive tooling for Clojure(Script) can be. Even so the point of the post is not to bash on Leiningen but to demonstrate how the overhead issues are not insurmountable - it just requires really knowing the tools (surprise) and which knobs to turn. In fact an implicit free idea for someone to explore is to automate all the optimizations for Leiningen that I covered.
TylerE 12y ago
That's not even a Clojure thing really. That's been the Achille's Heal of every interactive java app ever.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Only for those that inside in using only the OpenJDK. There are JVMs with JIT caches and AOT compilers. Even the reference JDK can start in a few ms using tiered compilation.
- kyllo 12y ago
  Hence the need for: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/SplashScreen.html http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/SplashScre...

daxfohl 12y ago

Way to kick a guy when he's down. Next thing you know he'll be relegated to selling half-finished keyboards out of Thailand.

SwellJoe 12y ago
What does this even mean?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - rads 12y ago
    It's a joke, people. Among the other things he's doing in Thailand, he actually is selling keyboards and seems to be quite content with his situation: http://technomancy.us/177 http://technomancy.us/177
- pbiggar 12y ago
  technomancy, the author of leiningen, is moving to Thailand and has a side-business of selling keyboards. See http://technomancy.us/177 http://technomancy.us/177

programminggeek 12y ago

As cool of a language as clojure might be, bad tooling is bad UX. Bad UX makes for a bad product. I don't care how many amazing features a language has, without great tools, it sucks. PHP is a terrible language in terms of design, but deploys are ridiculously easy, and refreshing a page is near instantaneous. There are plenty of other things to complain about with PHP, but part of its popularity is the relatively pleasant experience with the main tools.

mod 12y ago
It'll get better, but I don't disagree. I started using Django, as a relative newbie to python, back in 0.96, and it was a real pain in the ass to deploy. It took me a couple of days, minimum, all the while knowing I could have things halfway done in PHP. Luckily I was given a stellar recommendation, and I stuck with it. Django deploys now? Incredibly easy on the hosts I use (DO / Heroku). I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so. FWIW, I'm just starting to learn clojure. And just barely starting--these problems aren't annoying me yet.
- weavejester 12y ago
  > I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so. I'd say it was there years ago. On Heroku you can deploy any Clojure project that specifies a ":main" namespace. Deploying Clojure to a VPN is no different to any other language that runs behind an nginx proxy.
swannodette 12y ago
Extrapolating from the post that Clojure tooling is bad seems like a strange conclusion. I'm actually surprised that such a narrow post would find this much interest on HN. Clojure deploys are pretty ridiculously easy - and refreshing pages on a Clojure based web stack is also instantaneous. Seriously, Leiningen is great tooling. On pretty much every axis except startup speed I prefer it to everything else I've needed to use for work in other languages (Python, Ruby, and Node.js).
- phren0logy 12y ago

bachback 12y ago

Leining is a very useful tool. Starting up Clojure indeed is noticeable. I wonder how much of the performance is due to Maven, and if gradle would do better. Gradle is a newer project with a custom DSL based on Groovy.

wtetzner 12y ago
Not sure what you mean? Leiningen is its own build tool, it isn't using Maven. I believe it uses the aether library for dependency management, but as far as I know that's all they have in common.
- robert_tweed 12y ago
  Leiningen uses Maven for everything internally, it just goes to some effort to hide it most of the time.
  - weavejester 12y ago
    No it doesn't. I don't know why people think this.
    - kyllo 12y ago
      Because it interoperates with Maven. It can fetch and install code from Maven repositories, can read and write a pom.xml file, and uses the same groupId/artifactId/version format for specifying dependencies. And it also depends on a few org.apache.maven packages. So without looking at the source it would be easy to mistake lein for a Clojure wrapper around mvn. But it's more like a Clojure implementation of a superset of Maven's functionality, I guess.
      - robert_tweed 12y ago
        You and I are definitely both correct about it being a dependency: it caused me some installation headaches. I may have misunderstood the docs about how deep of a dependency it is; I haven't read the source. Returning to the OP's point, given that it is a dependency, it's still possible there is some resulting startup overhead, but I couldn't say for sure without profiling it.

htor 12y ago

Nice! Never occurred to me to compile ClojureScript itself.

kcorbitt 12y ago

It probably isn't the same issue that is causing the Leiningen slowdown, but as near as I can tell the really slow startup time is the main reason Clojure on Android isn't currently a viable option. Which is too bad, because I'd love to see the Clojure community's take on Android development. I can imagine a UI framework spiritually similar to Facebook's ReactJS appearing and making everything so much cleaner. And with a Lisp like Clojure there would no longer be any reason to use XML for layout and Java for logic -- it could all be unified into one cohesive language. Maybe I'm dreaming too big, but that would be an exciting future.

pjmlp 12y ago
Clojure is too slow, because of the vars creation that it does on startup. Work is ongoing to improve the situation for Clojure 1.7, but apparently the slowness won't go fully away. There as a post a few weeks ago on the mailing list about using ClojureScript instead, with compilation to Java bytecodes via Nashorn, before feeding the class files to Dalvik/ART. All of this is just too hacky for me. I would rather have a strong typed Clojure instead that wouldn't suffer from these pain points.

reitzensteinm 12y ago

I'd be careful about introducing more caching to the ClojureScript build process - I've been getting some really strange errors occasionally, the kind that leave garbled errors in the js that the source maps can't decypher, that disappear after a full clean & rebuild. I just released a site based on Clojure + Clojurescript, with the front end written in Reagent, and it was a pretty good experience overall. The above was my main issue with the setup. I've written more about the experience here (it seems there's not much interest in the site here, but at least the writeup should be interesting to those reading this post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791129 (Edit: it has since got a few upvotes, only to be killed by I guess the voting ring detection. C'est la vie.)

swannodette 12y ago
The issues you encountered likely arise from not recompiling dependent namespaces when you change a source file. It's something we'll probably address soon.
- reitzensteinm 12y ago
  Ah, interesting. This was both with the advanced and no optimisations, if that matters? My overall impression was that ClojureScript was already 90% the way there, so you've done a damn fine job of maintaining and pushing the project forward. Thank you very much for that!

grandalf 12y ago

This is great progress. I anticipate that fairly soon javascript will become the dominant compile target / runtime for clojure.

retrogradeorbit 12y ago

Hmmm. I bumped my clojurescript to 0.0-2511, and I get the following: $ lein trampoline run -m clojure.main Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not locate cljsbuild/compiler__init.class or cljsbuild/compiler.clj on classpath: , compiling:(.../target/66ddb53f4f237c7eb26e49c2637097e7cd8567d9-init.clj:1:4) ... Everything else works fine. Do we have a more complete example project that I can check mine against?

huahaiy 12y ago
I got the same error. Seems to be relevant to this issue: https://github.com/emezeske/lein-cljsbuild/issues/204 https://github.com/emezeske/lein-cljsbuild/issues/204 The suggestion seems to be "In the meantime: don't use trampoline, or chain the task explicitly, before the trampoline, e.g. lein do cljsbuild once, trampoline repl."

nightwolf 12y ago

It's not actually that JVM startup time is slow, it's Clojure startup time in particular. See: https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-startup.html https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-star... And the other articles here: https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/ https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/