Hi: I've recently discovered Clojure and have loosely followed some
of the discussions here. First of all, I think Clojure is a great
language, since I also love Lisp, and I feel that the Java platform is
the most robust for web development. But I perhaps come from a
background a little different that most Clojure fans because in most
situations my language of choice is C++. I've therefore thought about
how Clojure and C++ can benefit from each other. I actually have two
ideas:
First, I've been working on a parsing library for C++ which is
actually based on Perl6, in the sense that I try to implement a Perl6-
like rule system in C++. I decided to make Clojure the basis of the
"output" language for these grammars. In other words, a grammar (a
set of name rules) is compiled into a C++ class, with rule names
becoming methods. This class exposes a method which takes a given
file or string and matches it against its rules. The results of these
matches are then presented as Clojure-compatible data structures. If
there are Clojure functions or macros matching the rule names, the
output could be directly executed. In effect, any structured text for
which a grammar has been defined, can be compiled to Clojure code. I
think there are several applications for this technology, such as
using Clojure for data transfer, and creating a Lisp-like macro system
for non-Lisp-like languages.
What I'd like to do is use this to create C++ extensions, syntactic
shortcuts I can put in C++ code to make it more readable, and as hints
for code generators to automate things like serialization, as if C++
had Java-style annotations. This might be a little like GNU's "Melt"
project ("Middle End Lisp Translator"), but using Clojure in lieu of
Melt's own language, which I think is scheme-like but not compatible.
Using Clojure simplifies both portability (Melt is only on Unix etc.)
and storing information about source code and compilation-related info
in a database.
The other thing I've been thinking about is whether a full C++
implementation of Clojure is feasible. I've studied some low-level
Clojure implementation classes and I have not seen any prohibitive
challenges to porting Clojure to C++ rather as Xronos tried to port it
to .Net. Obviously Clojure will not have access to arbitrary C++
classes, but (maybe using the parsing tools I described above), there
could be easy-to-use development tools to give C++ classes Clojure-
interoperability capabilities. Does anyone know of Clojure features
which rely on Java features that would be prohibitively difficult to
implement in C++? Even a restricted subset of Clojure would be
helpful: I've actually gotten a fair amount of Clojure code to run as
Lisp, with some readtable manipulation, so there's a Lisp-like subset
of Clojure which doesn't rely on any Java features to run.
While I love Clojure, I think the development tools for Clojure are a
little primitive, and I've sensed a little frustration along these
lines from some posts here. Members of this group may disagree, but
I'm still not sold on Java as an application development language (as
opposed to a web development language), and IDEs which run on Java
seem a little slower and harder to use than native-compiled one. So a
native Clojure IDE might just make Clojure programming a little
easier, but there'd obviously have to be a native Clojure runtime.
Perhaps if this project is actively promoted or advocated for, there'd
be a chance to bring a wider pool of programmers into the Clojure
umbrella, those coming from C++ or Lisp or maybe even Arc, Haskell,
etc...
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