Bulk Code Generation 150 150 craig

Bulk Code Generation

As much fun as coding can be, I prefer to write code that generates code.

My most recent effort is gostd2joker, which collects information on Go’s standard library (the packages provided in its source tree) and generates the Go and Clojure code to provide access to some of those APIs within Joker, a Clojure interpreter that is written in Go. While there remain substantial limitations in terms of which APIs are eligible for transformation, the resulting list of converted packages is noticeably larger than that for “vanilla” Joker.

Having successfully deployed a few Joker scripts on my email server, mainly to test the waters (but also to replace fairly ugly Bash scripts with more-elegant Clojure code), I’m looking to further my use of Clojure. I’d like to achieve “Clojure Everywhere”, in which all my full-stack code (UI, backend, and quick-running scripts) is written in Clojure on top of various hosts (JVM, JavaScript, and the Go runtime).

Much work remains to be done, mainly to instill, in Joker, a proper concept of the Go runtime as a “host” to parallel Clojure’s JVM and ClojureScript’s JavaScript engines, thus introducing Go types (native and those provided via packages), field and method access to them, instantiation of instances of them, and so on.

The result should be quite useful, not only in my own research and development, but potentially to others who might find a quick-starting, low-overhead scripting language, with full access to the Go runtime, to be a formidable tool in their scripting arsenal.

Can you envision using such an enhanced version of Joker? If so, how?

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