tortilla - a thin Clojure wrapper for Java classes

My mom cooked the same food every day - tortillas, beans and meat. If it was enchiladas, it was - tortillas, beans and meat. If it was burritos, it was still - tortillas, beans and meat.
        — Felipe Esparza

Introduction

Interfacing to Java libraries from Clojure can be ugly. You have to use the special interop syntax, and either sprinkle type hints all over the place, or risk having runtime reflection killing performance.

Tortilla aims to remedy this by using reflection at compile time to automatically generate reflection-free idiomatic Clojure function wrappers around Java class methods. These wrappers then know the parameter types of the various candidate overloads and can select the correct one with simple type checks that are much faster than full runtime reflection.

Tortilla is still in the early alpha stages of development and has not yet been heavily tested, so it is not reecommended for use in production code. However, the basic functionality is mostly in place, so feel free to give it a try, and provide feedback if you find anything that doeesn't work, or any functionality that's missing.

Usage

There are two ways to use Tortilla: either as a macro that you call in your code to generqte the wrapper functions at compile time, or as a command-line interface (CLI) that you run before to generate Clojure source files that you then build with the rest of your code. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Installation

Macro

Add Tortilla as a dependency to your project. The latest version is:

CLI

You can download the latest CLI executable from github, or build it from source with lein bin in a clone of this repository.

Pros & Cons

• Macro mode can adapt to different versions of the wrapped Java library automatically, just by changing the dependency.
• Macro mode doesn't require a separate step to generate any Clojure wrapper source files, as everything happens during the normal build process.
• CLI mode is easier to debug, as the generated source is available to inspect.
• CLI mode generates better error messages, since they can refer to lines in the generated code.
• others...?

Filtering

Coercion

Inspiration

Tortilla is based on a post by Arne Brasseur on ClojureVerse. Since the code was only available in a gist, I took the liberty of cloning it into a full repo and developing it further.

License

Copyright © 2019 Arne Brasseur and Emlyn Corrin

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0.

This Source Code may also be made available under the following Secondary Licenses when the conditions for such availability set forth in the Eclipse Public License, v. 2.0 are satisfied: GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version, with the GNU Classpath Exception which is available at https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html.