Clojurians Log v2

Thanks, happy new year for you too! Well, Figwheel is not officially supported. There are some "hacks" but nothing concrete yet. But I believe is not hard to support - I can look at that starting on monday. Any reason why you're not using shadow-cljs? To be honest, Chlorine / Clover will probably always be better with shadow (for example, if you enable experimental features it'll resolve promises for you, show compilation warnings on the console, etc)

Shadow is pretty node-focused and I don't want to install node 🙂

(I know I can run Shadow as a JVM library but that's not very well documented and I get the impression it's not as well supported because it's not the "recommended approach")

Having used Shadow in the past, back when I was hacking on Chlorine(!), Figwheel feels a bit leaner and a bit more "standard" (and you know how much I love "simple" tooling!).

Well, the point about node is really a good point 😅. It's not hard to use shadow as a JVM library, but even if you do run shadow with clj you still need to install node dependencies (for example, react if you're going to use reagent, etc)...

As for leaner, I also prefer shadow to be honest. I think the configuration is easier and more reliable (I used mostly figwheel, not figwheel-main but I remember the compilation process to be quite unreliable). As for what I was studying for making figwheel compatible with Chlorine, I think that you will need to add some dependencies like piggieback and others. I was not able to start a cljs repl without it, for example, and even then needs some wiring.

Yeah, I see the "Editor Integration" section of Figwheel (main) talks about nREPL and Piggieback which does not thrill me at all 😞

Chlorine had an embedded ClojureScript REPL at some point? I see Clover does not. Did it go away from Chlorine as well?

Yes, I remember trying to start a cljs socket repl in figwheel and it gave me some errors like the absence of piggieback

Ah, both Chlorine and Clover have embedded cljs. The problem is that it only works with shadow for now, that's why I renamed it on Clover 😅

But in theory, connect embedded would detect if the current Clojure REPL have access to the shadow or figwheel API, and then run connect to the right REPL

The problem with both Shadow and Figwheel is that none have a "pure ClojureScript socket REPL" - you connect into Clojure then change it to CLJS

That's where piggieback comes - to make this bridge

(things are complicated in CLJS world!)

(well, except shadow-cljs that do have a "websocket REPL" that communicates directly with CLJS, but it's not standard by any means)

Figwheel talks about a websocket setup, but that's just for pushing changes to the browser?

Yes, exactly. Shadow also does that, but @thheller was kind enough to document the format of this websocket. For figwheel, as far as I know, it's just an implementation detail.

I don't even know if it's possible to connect to this websocket and issue evaluation commands to be honest...

I wonder if @bhauman would be amenable to either documenting what Figwheel does there, or offering some additional integration for a socket REPL, without the whole nREPL/Piggieback stuff?

nREPL and all its middleware just makes me sad. Just like node/npm makes me sad.

So I really want to avoid all of that if I can...

Well, if you don't use node dependencies like react/reagent or react/fulcro, you don't need npm at all, even with shadow-cljs

But if you do, you somehow need to solve the js dependency

Figwheel will use cljsjs (it's the node packages inside a jar). It remembers me when I was using Rails and Ruby was packing jquery inside a ruby package 😅

(sorry if this all is too basic)

I see shadow-cljs' alternative being better - I can, for example, use fulcro or reagent or whatever on native platforms like proton-native or react-native, or in command line interfaces just by installing the right npm. I also don't like npm too much, but I think it's what won the race :(

Or.. if you're not going to use any of these you can just import jquery or whatever in a Javascript tag and use it in cljs - no need to use node at all here

As for figwheel and socket repl, it's a hard problem. Compilation in cljs happens on clj side, so there's no way to "send a form to be evaluated in a pure ClojureScript repl" because there's no compiler on CLJS, and maybe it won't even have a JS environment to run...

So, what shadows do is to offer a websocket that happens as a way to push ClojureScript code to the browser. It runs on Clojure side, doubles as a clojure and ClojureScript repl, and also as a "poor man's REBL"

Figwheel does it differently I believe - the websocket server (which is also running on Clojure side) just sends code to the js env, and back. For they to support a pure socket repl I believe they'll have to change lots of things in their implementation

For example, when I used figwheel when I asked for a cljs repl, it waited for a js environment and then started the REPL as soon as it was present. If you open another tab, Figwheel will send the eval to the first one. And I have no idea what happens when you close the tab and tries to send eval again...

but I remember in the past that bizarre things happened like the REPL closing and I had to re-open it. I believe most of these issues are better now with figwheel-main. But yeah, cljs is quite complicated :(

I'm pretty set on re-frame (with Reagent/React under the hood), using cljsjs. No interest in native platforms, just regular web app stuff. But Figwheel has support for npm now I think?

Well, I'm going to continue on with this setup for now. I suspect what I'll do is write code as .cljc files and run a Clojure Socket REPL inside Figwheel and connect Clover to that so I can eval and get all the usual fun stuff 🙂

If you don't need to support clojure you can just set "eval mode" to CLJ on Clover config, then cljs files will be evaluated as clojure.

At least while I study on how to add figwheel support :)

I'm going to be building a full-stack app so I'll need real Clojure support as well as ClojureScript. I changed all my .cljs files to .cljc, moved the cljs-only startup bit to a new .cljs and now I can run Clover against a (Clojure) socket REPL and evaluate all my main app code (just not the startup bit) and run tests (also .cljc files) via Clover -- as well as them showing up in Figwheel's auto-test page 🙂

Yeah... I think this is going to work... It all looks and feels like Clojure (except the main.cljs startup) and auto-compile/-load works, and auto-tests run... OK. So, don't sweat the Figwheel support. I think I like this setup @mauricio.szabo 🙂