Writing a "cheating" Quine in Clojurescript - clojure

Suppose we wanted to write a cheating quine in clojure, we could do:
(ns cheating-quine)
... stuff here doesn't really matter ...
(println (slurp *file*))
Now, this does not work in Lein Figwheel because the value of file ends up being something like /tmp/form-init########.clj, and contains bootstrapping code of some sort.
Question: how can we get this "cheating" quine to work in clojurescript?
Note: the goal is NOT to write a quine. The goal is to write a cljs program which has access to the file it's defined in. This whole "cheating quine" thing is trying to explain the problem better then my previous failed attempt of
Clojure + Clojurescript: Macro to read code of current file

A cheating solution is to distribute the source code (e.g. put it in resources and serve it as a file) and compile a bootstrap to load and execute code, and get it to pull down your file, and in the file load the same file... that way it can do a HTTP request for the code that is currently running, and execute it. This is essentially how ClojureScript browser REPLs such as http://clojurescript.io/ work... They compile and execute incoming code on the fly. clojuresript.io is a good working example of ClojureScript bootstrapping if you are interested in it, but a word of caution, there is quite a lot going on so expect to invest quite some time :)

Related

How do you mock file reading in Clojure

I have the following code that loads edn data from my resources folder:
(defn load-data
[]
(->> (io/resource "news.edn")
slurp
edn/read-string))
I'd like to test this by mocking out the file reading part, so far I have this:
(deftest loading-data
(is (= (edn/read-string (prn-str {:articles [{:title "ASAP Rocky released" :url "http://foo.com"}]})) (load-data))))
But I know this very flaky test because if the edn file name changes or it's contents or updated, the test will fail. Any ideas?
You can mock out a call to function with with-redefs, that "Temporarily redefines Vars while executing the body". E.g.,
(deftest load-data-test
(with-redefs [slurp (constantly "{:a \"b\"}")]
(is (= (load-data) {:a "b"}))))
This way the slurp in load-data in the scope of with-redefs returns "{:a \"b\"}".
What about this function are you wanting to gain confidence for? Are you worried that news.edn won't exist? Are you worried slurping and or edn reading won't work on a resource?
My advice is to test your separate concerns separately
If you're worried about news.edn not existing assert against it's existence
If you're worried about the rest of the function not converting from edn add a new signature to accept a resource then provide another resource at test time to assert against
If you're worried about the shape of the file maybe have a test that runs against the data before it's put in news.edn
Then when you come back to these tests years later you'll see clear reasons for failures instead of a test that fell over because of N possible reasons that are unknown till debug time
As other's have suggested: Mock less things.
It might be a reflex you learned from building Java tests.
If you have composed your functions correctly, you can test them individually without the need for side-effects (like reading a file).
If you mock slurp in your example, you are not testing anything meaningful: You would essentially test if the standard function edn/read-string works as intended.
Rewrite your load-data to accept the name of the file to load as argument (and later call it with news.edn in your "main"). This makes it way more functional and this way you can easily test load-data the way you test it right now, but you pass down some test-news.edn from your test resources. And there is no need to mock anything for the happy path.
This way you can also write test for other scenarios: what if the file is missing? Or the .edn file is malformed. What if you pass some resource that loads forever? etc.

Can you save your Clojure REPL's state (or, effectivelly, can you program complex programs using REPL?)

After defining variables, functions, etc., can you save what you have done on the REPL too an text .clj file?
most people work with the repl through an editor such ad Eclipse/Emacs/vim and that editor has the ability to save the repl, though without some diligence on the developers part this will likely be an incomplete record of what happened. Some of the state of the repl may have come from loading files etc which will be in a different state.
So the short answer is typically not.
In Linux (mine = Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS) if you are using lein then check for .lein (hidden directory) and look for repl-history. You should find the commands that you have typed or pasted into the REPL. This can be a source for later edit - I use geany...
I am answering the parenthetical part of your question. For me, the Clojure REPL is very useful for testing functions and proving out concepts that take no more than a few lines. I will often put hooks in a module that is not the main, just so I can load a file and run it through a couple of functions. I can also do this from main using the same mindset; that is write a debug function.
I found the Eclipse plugin to be quite useful, but I do not use it much these days, mostly Vim and running the module with one or more special functions and running the main. I don't know of any way to save REPL state.

How can you dump contents of Clojure REPL to a file?

So I have been working on a Clojure tutorial and it's pretty fun so far. Unfortunately, every time I close my REPL out, I lose all of the defn and def that I created in the previous session.
So, to save time in the future, is it possible to have the Clojure REPL save everything I've typed to a file so I can dig out what I need for future uses?
I think most people work by using their IDE to send fragments of code to the REPL, rather than doing a lot of direct hacking in the REPL. This way you have a better idea of the current state of the program.
If you use Emacs and SLIME, you can save the REPL buffer to a file just like saving any other buffer.
If you are using a Unix-like operating system you can start your REPL using rlwrap. This would give you Ctrl-R for accessing commands from history in an easy way, as well as storing the history itself.
You'd just have to install rlwrap and prepend it to the line where you start REPL, e.g. rlwrap lein repl
Couple of tips:
I do a lot of coding in the REPL, but as soon as I write something that works then I copy/paste it into a source file. Then I can just run or reload that source file whenever I want to get a REPL environment back to a fully configured state.
Some REPLs (e.g. the Eclipse Counterclockwise REPL that I use) keep history from previous sessions so you can up-arrow to the earlier REPL commands you want to repeat.
This is actually a harder problem than it seems because a dump like this must take into account symbol and vars dependencies and output to file in the correct order of symbols. That said since code is data one should be able to write a function that does that.

FileNotFoundException when making a jar file from the clojure file

I am trying to go through the process of creating a jar file from a simple clojure file. Below is my clojure code:
(ns app.first (:gen-class))
(refer 'clojure.core)
(defn -main [& args] (println "this program worked!"))
I am using these instructions to create the jar file: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Tutorials_and_Tips
I see the error "java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not locate app/hello__init.class or app/hello.clj on classpath: (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)" when I try to complete the (compile 'app.first) step.
The only difference between my attempt and the link is the name of my file (first.clj instead of hello.clj).
Can anyone see where I am going wrong? Or for that matter, all I want to do is learn how to create a jar from a clojure file, so if anyone knows of a better/easier way to do that, let me know.
It's better to use Leiningen for such tasks - it allows to maintain dependencies, and packs all necessary components into jar file
I'm rusty on this, but I heard about other people with similar problems.
I think it's helpful to remember that the classpath you indicate points to the root of your class tree, and package names end up creating subdirectories within that tree. Awkwardly stated, but I hope you get the idea. Thus, I think you need to do some kind of gymnastics with creating directories to match the "app.first" -> "/app/first" hierarchy.
Sorry, that's as close as I come to a sensible and useful answer. Hope this helps you.
EDIT:
The Prime Directive of Computer Science: It only works if you do everything right! I spent almost 10 minutes fiddling with this but was finally successful.
Here's what I needed to do to get your program to compile:
created a directory app, and within that, first.clj with your code.
checked for the *compile-path* by doing (pr *compile-path) within Clojure. It said "classes".
created a second directory classes parallel to app.
in the shell, did export CLASSPATH=.:./classes
in Clojure, did (compile 'app.first)
... and I found a bunch of class files in classes. JARring those should be a snap.
I found it very helpful to run (doc compile) because that reminded me of the requirement to have a directory to satisfy the requirement for a *compile-path*.

Apache mod_c++ wanted?

I want to experiment a bit with C++ as a server side language. I'm not looking for a framework, and simply want to achieve a silly old "Hello World" webapp using C++.
Is there an Apache HTTP server module that I can install?
If i can do the PHP equivalent of :
<?php
$personName = "Peter Pan";
echo "Hello " . $personName;
I'd be most thrilled! Thanks in advance!
cgi would do this. Just have your C++ app spit its output to stdout and your mod_cgi will handle it
You might want to have a look at http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt or www.tntnet.org instead.
"mod_c++" doesn't make sense; Once you're talking about compiled programs, Apache doesn't care what language the binary comes from. mod_cgi allows Apache to invoke such a binary (regardless of it's source language) in response to HTTP requests. Read more here:
http://library.thinkquest.org/16728/content/cgi/cplusplus.html
Suppose for the moment the OP wanted something that was "like mod_php, mod_perl". Given the right configuration, it would be monumentally easy for the "mod_c++" to look at the source files, and compiled files and decide whether it had to do a "one off" compilation task. In fact this is how make works.
I know the OP probably didn't mean that it had to be "interpreted", but it's certainly not impossible to allow apache to compile cpp files on the fly if needed [this is how jsp works, btw].
I did create a mod_cpp once. It basically was written in c, but loaded a .so which was in turn written in C++.
Its performance was really good, but lacked a lot of things that we take for granted in things like PHP (sessions, HTML un/escaping, etc). It did use a template engine to separate the HTML from the C++.
I tell you, the initial set-up was a lot of work (the mod_cpp part); after that, it was kinda easy to write the .so's. I even tried to create an sf.net project to open-source it, but I never got around to actually porting it :-(
In summary: I did not find anything like that on the net, did it myself and found out to be a lot more work then I anticipated, but the result was very cool! This helped me a lot: Apache Modules
I'm not saying there is no such thing, but if there is it would be monumentally inefficient. C++ is a compiled language, not an interpretive one, so the putative Apache C++ module would have to invoke the C++ compiler to compile the code before executing it. This would be very, very slow, apart from other problems.