Book Image

Mastering Clojure

By : Akhil Wali
Book Image

Mastering Clojure

By: Akhil Wali

Overview of this book

Clojure is a general-purpose language from the Lisp family with an emphasis on functional programming. It has some interesting concepts and features such as immutability, gradual typing, thread-safe concurrency primitives, and macro-based metaprogramming, which makes it a great choice to create modern, performant, and scalable applications. Mastering Clojure gives you an insight into the nitty-gritty details and more advanced features of the Clojure programming language to create more scalable, maintainable, and elegant applications. You’ll start off by learning the details of sequences, concurrency primitives, and macros. Packed with a lot of examples, you’ll get a walkthrough on orchestrating concurrency and parallelism, which will help you understand Clojure reducers, and we’ll walk through composing transducers so you know about functional composition and process transformation inside out. We also explain how reducers and transducers can be used to handle data in a more performant manner. Later on, we describe how Clojure also supports other programming paradigms such as pure functional programming and logic programming. Furthermore, you’ll level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure's powerful macro system. Parallel, asynchronous, and reactive programming techniques are also described in detail. Lastly, we’ll show you how to test and troubleshoot your code to speed up your development cycles and allow you to deploy the code faster.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Clojure
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References
Index

Chapter 2. Orchestrating Concurrency and Parallelism

Let's now examine how concurrent and parallel programming are supported in Clojure. The term concurrent programming refers to managing more than one task at the same time. Parallel programming or parallelism, on the other hand, deals with executing multiple tasks at the same time. The distinction between these two terms is that concurrency is about how we structure and synchronize multiple tasks, and parallelism is more about running multiple tasks in parallel over multiple cores. The main advantages of using concurrency and parallelism can be elaborated as follows:

  • Concurrent programs can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. For example, a desktop application can have a single task for handling user interaction and another task for handling I/O and network communication. A single processor can be shared among several tasks. Processor utilization is thus more effective in concurrent programs.

  • Parallel programs take advantage of having...