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0 pointshuahaiy1y ago0 comments

But if you add type hint in the signature, it does check the type. Basically, if you specify the type, it will check type. Just like any language that is not automatically inferring types, e.g. Java. So it is the same as Java.

You guys make it out like Clojure is doing something extra to hide Java types, but it doesn’t. What Clojure does is really minimal on top of Java. It barely hides anything.

If you give it type, it will check type. If you don’t give a type, it falls back to a default type, Object, which IS a TYPE. The fact that Clojure compiler cannot deal with GraalVM SVM Pointer type tells you that it’s checking type, because Pointer is not an Object! I found this out the hard way: https://yyhh.org/blog/2021/02/writing-c-code-in-javaclojure-...

“One limitation that one needs to be aware of when writing native image related Clojure code, is that most things in the GraalVM SDK inherit from org.graalvm.word.WordBase, not from java.lang.Object, which breaks the hidden assumption of a lot of Clojure constructs.”

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lkitching1y ago

I've already shown that type hints do not constitute type checking:

  (defn f [^String s] (.length s))
  (f 3)

is a valid Clojure program that fails at runtime with a cast error.

  class X { public static int f(String s) { return s.length(); } }
  X.f(3)

is not a valid Java program at all. Clojure compilation generates bytecode to dispatch dynamically and all but the most basic checks are handled at runtime by the JVM. This is fundamentally different to the static type checking that languages like Java and Scala do. It's not that Clojure is hiding something from Java, but rather that it isn't doing the considerable amount of effort the Java type checker does to analyse the program before execution. This is by design - Clojure has deliberately avoided adding a static type system in favour of things like spec.

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