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

Comparing transducers and reducers


Both transducers and reducers, which were discussed in Chapter 3, Parallelization Using Reducers, are ways to improve the performance of computations performed over collections. While transducers are a generalization of data processing for multiple data sources, there are a few other subtle differences between transducers and reducers, which are described as follows:

  • Transducers are implemented as part of the Clojure language in the clojure.core namespace. However, reducers must be explicitly included in a program, as they are implemented in the clojure.core.reducers namespace.

  • Transducers only create a collection when producing the final result of a series of transformations. There are no intermediary collections required to store the results of a transformation that constitutes a transducer. On the other hand, reducers produce intermediate collections to store results, and only avoid the creation of unnecessary empty collections.

  • Transducers deal with efficient...