Should Linux distributions ship Clojure byte compiled (AOT) or not?

maxweber · February 23, 2024, 6:45pm

That’s great, I’m looking forward to the Guix integration.

Here is an example I came across recently:

clj-commons/digest/blob/6366ce792684eaeaab2b61ec3f520378269ed920/src/digest.clj#L105


      
                  (alter-meta! update-meta))))
          
          (defn- create-fns
            "Create utility function for each digest algorithms.
             For example will create an md5 function for MD5 algorithm."
            []
            (doseq [algorithm (algorithms)]
              (create-fn! algorithm)))
          
          ; Create utility functions such as md5, sha-256 ...
          (create-fns)

This Clojure namespace dynamically creates new functions when it is loaded. I created a checkpoint of the JVM. During this phase non of the Security providers are registered. Therefore the dynamic functions were missing, which broke other parts of our code. Like others already said Clojure can be very dynamic, therefore it’s not possible to AOT compile all Clojure code.