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

Using actors


Actors are another way of modeling a system as a large number of concurrently running processes. Each process in the actor model is termed as an actor, and this model is based on the philosophy that every piece of logic in a system can be represented as an actor. The theory behind actors was first published by Carl Hewitt in the early '70s. Before we explore actors, we must note that the core Clojure language and libraries do not provide an implementation of the actor model. In fact, it is a widely accepted notion in the Clojure community that processes and channels are a much better methodology to model concurrently running processes compared to actors. That aside, actors can be used to provide more resilient error handling and recovery, and it is possible to use actors in Clojure through the Pulsar library (https://github.com/puniverse/pulsar).

Note

To find out more about why processes and channels are preferred over actors in Clojure, take a look at Clojure core.async Channels...