Forcing Cake to reload functions from my .clj files - clojure

Question

I'm new to Clojure, and after too much of my life have been already wasted on waiting for Leiningen to run my code, I'm trying to move to Cake. While Cake's persistent JVM loads up blazing fast - it presents a bigger problem - my functions are also persistent!
To demonstrate the problem, I've started a cake project(using cake new mess-up-with-cake), and wrote this in core.clj:
(ns mess-up-with-cake.core)
(defn main-function[]
(println "I'm in the main function")
)
(println "I'm in core.clj, not inside in any function")
And this is project.clj:
(defproject mess-up-with-cake "0.0.1-SNAPSHOT"
:description "TODO: add summary of your project"
:dependencies [[clojure "1.2.0"]])
(use 'mess-up-with-cake.core)
(deftask my-task
(println "I'm in my task")
(main-function)
)
When running it with cake my-task, I get:
I'm in core.clj, not inside in any function
I'm in my task
I'm in the main function
No surprise here.
Now, I've changed core.clj to this:
(ns mess-up-with-cake.core)
(defn main-function[]
(println "I'm in the main function")
(println "I've made a change in the main function")
)
(println "I'm in core.clj, not inside in any function")
(println "I've made a change outside the main function")
And when I run it, I get
I'm in core.clj, not inside in any function
I've made a change outside the main function
I'm in my task
I'm in the main function
core.clj was clearly reloaded, but the change I've made inside the main function was not printed! Only when I stop the JVM with cake kill and rerun it I get the desired result - but if I have to restart the JVM every time I change a function, I might as well go back to lein...
Any idea how to force cake to reload my functions(and only my functions - reloading the entire Clojure runtime + any libraries I'm using probably won't be much faster than restarting the JVM..)?

Answer 1

This may not directly answer your question, though I hope it helps:
It sounds like your workflow if you where using leiningen would be to run:
lein run
wait for the JVM to start up .... get bored ...
observe result
edit code
repeat
This is a very common pattern in most languages and it's occasionally used for Clojure development (and Cake is very helpful here). It is much more common for Clojure development to use a single instance of the project and connect the editor to that instance using nrepl (or Slime and Swank). Because most everyone leaves the project running while they do the development not many people feel this pain and so the solutions are not as good in my opinion. Cake has largely been merged into Leiningen and the future direction of the Cake project is not clear to me (I could very well be wrong on this point). Of the Clojureians I know, all of them have moved to Leiningen and connect to their project from an editor like Emacs or vim.
a common workflow is:
start Emacs
M-x nrepl-jack-in
Ctrl-c Crtl-l to reload all the namespace and all it's dependent namespaces (this is close to a solution to your problem)
hack, load, repeat ;-)
This workflow is not Emacs or VI specific, the same method is used from Eclipse and Intelij
re: " reloading the entire Clojure runtime + any libraries I'm using probably won't be much faster than restarting the JVM".
I find it to be no more than two seconds even with my larger projects

Answer 2

I used to struggle with the slow JVM startup speed as well, and had mixed success with Cake. You might want to take a look at the excellent autoexpect plugin for Leiningen, explained in some length in the author's blog post. Basically autoexpect reloads your code every time the working directory tree is updated (and evaluates any expect clause, reporting any test failures). Makes continuous testing a dream -- I sometimes have two shells going in Emacs -- one for the output of lein autoexpect, one for a connected REPL to send snippets of code to as the other poster is suggesting.
I like the continuous testing style so much I wrote a similar utility in Python for my non-Clojure development (described in this blog post) -- for Clojure, I use autoexpect.