What's in a Var?

There are many features that set Clojure apart from other programming languages but two pretty remarkable ones that don’t get much airplay are vars and metadata. I suspect the reason is two-fold: there are more obvious benefits and these features don’t have analogous counterparts in popular programming languages rendering them illegible to many people.

However once you have them their absence in other programming languages quickly becomes frustrating. Hopefully this post will make their utility more readily apparent, and for those of you that already use Clojure, you may be interested to hear that there’s now support for certain forms of var usage in ClojureScript 0.0-2496. More on that later.

Metadata

Metadata in Clojure is beautifully simple - it’s data about data. All persistent collections in Clojure support metadata. They allow you to arbitrarily annotate values leaving the value otherwise unchanged:

( ns my.cool.program ) ( def xs ( with-meta [ 1 2 3 ] { ::created # inst "2014-12-18T00:20:51.337-00:00" }) ( println ( map inc xs )) ;; => (2 3 4) ( println ( meta xs )) ;; => {::created #inst "2014-12-18T00:20:51.337-00:00"}

Most languages force you to store this information elsewhere. Some languages like JavaScript support adding arbitrary properties to existing objects but then you find yourself fretting over the very real possibility of name clashes and unintended visibility (i.e. during enumeration).

While adding the above annotation is deliciously devoid of ceremony, how does this solve the name clash issue? ::created is a namespaced keyword. The compiler will actually interpret it as :my.cool.program/created . Namespaces are a first class construct for representing a logical grouping of values and functions (in other languages think package or module). They are a scoping mechanism.

Let’s make this more concrete.

Suppose you write your own program with your own namespace and you want to use my xs value. One way to import it and annotate it might look like so:

( ns your.cool.program ( :require [ my.cool.program :refer [ xs ]])) ( def ys ( vary-meta xs assoc ::created # inst "2014-12-18T00:50:29.859-00:00" ))

Oops!

Or … maybe not?

( meta ys ) ;; {:my.cool.program/created #inst "2014-12-18T00:20:51.337-00:00" ;; :your.cool.program/created #inst "2014-12-18T00:50:29.859-00:00"}

Vars

Whenever you make a top level def in Clojure you are introducing a var into a namespace. Normally you just use the value that a var is bound to:

( ns foo.bar ) ( defn add [ a b ] ( + a b )) ( add 1 2 ) ;; => 3

However you can also get the reified var like so:

( var add ) ;; => #'add

Huh.

Doesn’t seem very useful.

( meta ( var add )) ;; => {:ns #<Namespace foo.bar>, :name add, :arglists ([a b]) ;; :file "foo/bar.clj", :column 1, :line 3}

Boom.

Vars are a powerful direct reflective tool - a considerable amount of existing Clojure tooling relies on vars to meaningfully reason about Clojure programs without having to play the tedious parser/AST game.

So it’s little surprise that Clojure testing frameworks (including the standard clojure.test) use vars to reflect on namespaces to extract tests and run them.

Vars for ClojureScript

When Rich Hickey first announced ClojureScript in 2011 one somewhat controversial decision was the omission of reified vars and namespaces. This omission was driven by the real world pressure to deliver compact code to browser based clients.

ClojureScript generates code optimized for the Google Closure Compiler - by following certain conventions Closure can perform aggressive minification and dead code elimination. However the conventions are quite strict - Closure namespaces are represented as JavaScript objects where all properties are known at compile time:

goog . provide ( " my.cool.program " ); my . cool . program . foo = function ( a , b ) { return a + b ; };

This convention more or less throws out the possibility of reified vars and namespaces, at least not without incurring inefficiencies across many axes.

The first class nature of vars and namespaces seems impossibly at odds with the compilation strategy.

Or is it?

Upon closer inspection a surprisingly large amount of Clojure var usage is in fact of the static variety - “Give me the docstring for this var”, or “Give me all the vars in the namespace foo.bar.baz”.

It turns out that can we provide a simple mechanism that delivers var power without full reification.

Starting with ClojureScript 0.0-2496 the following works fine:

( ns my.cool.program ) ( defn foo [ a b ] ( + a b )) ( meta ( var foo )) ;; => {:ns #<Namespace my.cool.program>, :name foo, :arglists ([a b]) ;; :file "my/cool/program.cljs", :column 1, :line 3}

Wow. What just happened?

The ClojureScript compiler now has explicit handling of the var special form. When it encounters a var expression it emits a Var instance which has all the compile time metadata you’ve come to know and love in Clojure.

The new cljs.test namespace is built on this functionality and anyone else can do the same.

Couple this arrival with an evolving stable and simplified API, ClojureScript now delivers fantastic facilities for user programs to reflect on static information known to the compiler to enable powerful forms of metaprogramming. All this without sacrificing a compilation model that enables reasonably compact and efficient JavaScript.

The following is the actual macro to filter out every test in a given namespace, establish a reporting environment, and run them all. At 14 lines of code this is a pretty solid return on investment: