Start spreadin’ the news, I’m releasin’ today

I want to be a part of it

New York, New York

These vagabond forms, are longing to eval

Right through the very REPL of it

New York, New York…

Following the long overdue overview of nREPL 0.6 I’ve got a new one for you! Brace yourselves for an overdue overview of the recently released CIDER 0.21 (New York)!

It terms of volume of changes it’s a pretty small release. If you consider their impact, however, you’ll see it packs quite the punch! In fact it’s probably one of the most significant releases CIDER has had in the past couple of years.

Printing Improvements

You probably never saw this coming, but CIDER is now the first nREPL client that makes use of the new streaming printing functionality introduced in nREPL 0.6!

In practical terms this means that when dealing with a big value you’ll see it printed in chunks (meaning faster feedback cycle) and you’d be able to interrupt the print process (e.g. with C-c C-c if you’re in a REPL buffer). No more REPLs will be sacrificed to the evil Lord of Infinite data structures!

CIDER also introduced a configuration option to limit the total size of a printed value regardless of the values of *print-length* and friends. Its name is cider-print-quota and its default is 1MB. Setting it to nil will disable it.

We also used the opportunity to clean up and consolidate the print-related configuration options:

cider-pprint-fn and cider-pprint-options are now obsolete, replaced by cider-print-fn and cider-print-options .

and are now obsolete, replaced by and . cider-debug-print-options , cider-stacktrace-print-options , and cider-repl-pretty-print-width are now all obsolete, replaced by cider-print-options .

cider-nrepl bundles print functions based on clojure.pprint , fipp , puget and zprint , that you can use out of the box with nREPL’s new print middleware. You can easily define your own as well. Here’s one of the wrappers so you can get an idea about how basic they are:

( defn fipp-pprint ([ value writer ] ( fipp-pprint value writer {})) ([ value writer options ] ( binding [ *out* writer ] ( fipp.edn/pprint value options ))))

Basically you need a function which accept the value to print, a writer instance and a map of options controlling the printer.

By default printing in the REPL is now done with clojure.print . Interactive evaluation results are not pretty-printed, as multi-line results don’t look very nice in the minibuffer or inline.

Custom REPL Initialization Code

We’ve introduced the configuration option cider-repl-init-code . This is a list of strings containing Clojure code to evaluate when the REPL starts (with bindings for any set! -able vars in place). It replaces cider-print-length and cider-print-level , which are now obsolete. The new option is more flexible and can be used for any forms you’d like to run when starting a new REPL:

( add-to-list 'cider-repl-init-code "(set! *print-length* 1000)" ) ( add-to-list 'cider-repl-init-code "(set! *print-level* 10)" ) ( add-to-list 'cider-repl-init-code "(my-favourite-repl-init-logic)" )

Be careful how exactly you modify this list, as it contains by default the code requiring Clojure’s REPL utility functions like doc and source , namely:

( clojure.core/apply clojure.core/require clojure.main/repl-requires )

That’s why I suggested the use of add-to-list , although you can edit the list however you prefer.

Faster REPL

CIDER’s REPL has become notorious when it comes to dealing with lots of output. This release takes a few small steps to reduce the REPL performance issues.

Prior to version 0.21.0, the REPL buffer would be automatically re-centered whenever any output was printed, so that the prompt was on the bottom line of the window, displaying the maximum possible amount of output above it. Turned out, however, this had a horrible impact on performance and now is no longer the default behaviour. You can replicate the old behaviour by setting the built-in Emacs option scroll-conservatively , for example:

( add-hook 'cider-repl-mode-hook ' ( lambda () ( setq scroll-conservatively 101 )))

Extensive profiling sessions of printing large results at the REPL helped identify a couple of easy wins around excessive object allocation (we used to spend a surprising amount of time in GC when the REPL was printing):

Reuse the same buffer in nrepl-bdecode rather than creating a new one each time.

rather than creating a new one each time. Combine calls to replace-regexp-in-string .

. Ensure we always insert output before the REPL prompt.

It’s funny how several trivial tweaks can amount to pretty solid performance gains overall!

Grab Bag

Probably some of you already knew that evaluations weren’t the only operations you could interrupt in CIDER. For a very long time you could use the same command ( cider-interrupt ) to interrupt test runs in progress as well. CIDER 0.21 extended this to all cider-ns-refresh-* commands.

You can find a complete list of all changes in the release notes.

Upgrade Notes

The good news is that this time around we broke fewer things than usually, so this section is going to be pretty short!

CIDER 0.21 (New York) requires nREPL 0.6 to work properly. If you rely on cider-jack-in probably you won’t need to do anything besides upgrading the CIDER package. If you rely on cider-connect you’ll need to make sure you’re connecting to an nREPL 0.6 server:

Lein users should upgrade to Lein 2.9+.

Boot users will need to put nREPL 0.6 in their Boot profiles or project dependencies.

Piggieback needs to be at version 0.4+ to work properly with nREPL 0.6.

The optimal cider-nrepl version is 0.21.1.

version is 0.21.1. CIDER no longer sets any defaults for *print-length* and *print-level* . They were mostly replaced by the new cider-print-quota .

I’m really glad to share the news that Michael Griffiths came out of retirement to make CIDER great (again)!

Michael had been a key CIDER contributor for several years now. He’s behind much of CIDER’s ClojureScript support and also worked on cool features like CIDER’s reloaded workflow and the pretty-printing functionality we had prior to nREPL 0.6. He was away from CIDER for a couple of years and his absence was strongly felt, as without him things really stagnated on the ClojureScript side. It’s really great to have him back!

Michael drove the entire CIDER 0.21 from start to finish and did an exceptional job! Buy him a cider or 5 if you happen to meet him!

(next CIDER)

I’m still ruminating on the roadmap for the next CIDER release. Most likely it will be fairly small and won’t feature more than 2-3 new features. Some shortlisted candidates are:

Extend the functionality available without cider-nrepl (see here)

(see here) Ability to hot-load a dependency straight from CIDER (replacement for a functionality that used to live in refactor-nrepl, but got broken with Java 9)

Merge orchard and cljs-tooling together (see here)

In general I still believe that the biggest short-term gains are going to come from further improvements of nREPL itself, so I’ll likely keep my focus there for the foreseeable future.

There are also quite a few tickets that have piled up - enhancement requests, bug reports, etc. At some point I have to sift through all of them and decide which we’re are going to eventually tackle. It’s pretty depressing to have 160 open tickets on your issue tracker!

If you’re looking for a simple way to help out you can certainly participate in the issue grooming process!

Epilogue

If I can eval it there

I’m gonna eval it anywhere

It’s up to you, New York, New York

It feels awesome to see that in the time I was away CIDER made such a bit leap forward. This speaks volumes to the health of the project and shows that clearly CIDER can progress even without me.

Now let’s give a big round of applause for the man of the hour (release?) - Michael! You’re awesome and we love you!

That’s all from me, folks! Drink CIDER (responsibly), code long, have fun, and prosper!