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A fast zprint filter

Given the advent of graalvm from Oracle Labs, you can now have a native image zprint-filter which will accept Clojure(script) source code on stdin and emit formatted Clojure(script) source code on sdtout. It will both startup faster than the equivalent code in node.js, and run faster than code running on the JVM.

55ms to startup the full application!

Performance

These numbers are approximate, and are from a mid-2012 MacBook Air. Your numbers will almost certainly be better:

Version of zprint-filter-0.4.9Startup (format "hello world")Format 129 locFormat 3978 loc
graalvm native-image0.055s0.330s3.425s
JVM 1.8 appcds1.111s2s6.981s
node0.260s2s18s

The Linux version is about the same as the MacOS version. I don't have a directly comparable Linux box to measure it on.

Installation

The good news about the graalvm zprint-filter -- it is fast! The bad news is that we are back to a different version for each platform.

Linux

You can download a pre-build Linux image from zprint GitHub, look for zprintl-0.4.12 (or the appropriate version) in the latest zprint release.

MacOS

You can now download a pre-build MacOS image from zprint GitHub, look for zprintm-0.4.12 (or the appropriate version) in the latest zprint release.

Usage

The zprintl-0.4.12 or zprintm-0.4.12 It is a regular "unix-like" filter which will run on Linux or MacOS respectively -- without any JVM involved!. You use it like:

./zprintm-0.4.12 < core.clj > core.new.clj

It reads the source code and spits out formatted source code. It will accept an options map as on the command line. Don't forget to put "'" around the options map, or the results won't be what you expect. An example:

./zprintm-0.4.12 '{:style :community}' < core.clj > core.new.clj

If you put it on your path, you can just run it from anywhere. I use it in my editor, to format a function while I'm editing it. For most functions, it runs fast enough I don't even notice it.

Caveat

Zprint will not build directly with native-image, as there are 5 "unsupported" exceptions. I haven't done any analysis of what these might be, since they aren't obvious. However, it will build with

-H:+ReportUnsupportedElementsAtRuntime

and in my testing, I don't get any "unsupported" elements reported at runtime. Should you encounter one of these, please submit an issue!

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