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ClojureScript Macros: A (Not So) Long Journey [Part II] by@frozar
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ClojureScript Macros: A (Not So) Long Journey [Part II]

by Fabien ROZARJuly 2nd, 2020
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This is the second part of my journey to learn Clojure/Script macro. This article will deal with Clojure macro. It's easier to build from solid basics rather than eagerly jump to the last step. I like to go one step after another, thus I thought it is a good idea to learn how to write Clojure macro first. The idea of macro came from John McCarthy, who created the LISP language in the 1950s. He was fascinated by the idea of writing programs with "algebraic" means. For example, add-bubble will take thefunction as argument and generate thefunction which is the side-effect version of it.

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The writing of Clojure/Script macro may seem as a wizard senior programming craft, but this article will show you that it's not the case. This is the second part of my journey to learn Clojure/Script macro and this article will deal with Clojure macro.

Motivation

In the part I article of this serie, I exposed my issue which is illustrated by this snippet:

(defn- add-bubble [appstate bubble]
  (update appstate :bubbles conj bubble))

(defn add-bubble! [bubble]
  (swap! appstate (fn [appstate_arg] (add-bubble appstate_arg bubble))))

I would like to write a macro, let say

BANG
, which will take the
add-bubble
function as argument and generate the
add-bubble!
function which is the side-effect version of it.

Even if my goal is to write ClojureScript macro, I like to go one step after another, thus I thought it is a good idea to learn how to write Clojure macro first. ClojureScript takes its origin from Clojure, and from my experience in programming, it's easier to build from solid basics rather than eagerly jump to the last step. Also from my experience, you usually get more documentation/ressources from the root language than its derivative.

Macro: the origin

During my try/error process in learning macro, I was wondering: where does this idea of macro came from? As Clojure is known to be a dialect of Lisp, the path to its origin is clear.Lisp was invented by and its team in the late 1950s at MIT. At this time, FORTRAN was really the main programming language used on the early years of IBM machines. When McCarthy discovered the FORTRAN language, he was fascinated by the idea of writing programs with "algebraic" means. But as his main topic was Artificial Intelligence, he was also convinced of the need of a different way to express a program to a computer.

Another programming language which would allow to handle symbolic expressions. These thought lead him to create the LISP language. If you're interested by the history of LISP language, I recommend you where you'll get the historical context of McCarthy's work as well as the atmosphere at this time between the machine builder, the compiler builder and R&D interests (read funding). From this article:

Already in 1956 it was clear that one had to work with symbolic expressions to reach the goal of artificial intelligence. As the researchers already understood numerical computation would not have much importance. McCarthy, in his aim to express simple, short description parts by short language elements, saw the composition of algebraic sub-expressions as an ideal way to reach this goal.
In , you can find a list of 24 new ideas for programming language (at this time) from McCarthy. I quote here some idea which are the essence of macro in my humble opinion:
(4) extensibility of programs (incremental compiler) and changeability of programs,
(10) possibilities for manipulating symbolic quantities.
Rich Hickey, the author and maintainer of Clojure, has recently published an article titled . This article explained his motivations around Clojure, some design choice he has made in the language, and obviously discuss about similarities and differences between LISP and Clojure. On the topic of macro, Clojure macros are similar to Common Lisp macros. One difference discussed is about how symbol are manipulated by these two languages. In Clojure symbols are essentially simple names: their resolution to a value can be delayed. As long as you don't required the value behind a symbol, you don't know if a symbol is bound a to value, or from where its potential value come from. During the talk , Rich Hickey said about Clojure macro:
macros are manipulating this name-world not this var-world

Finally, when I was looking for more documentation about macro, I discovered there are two kinds of macro: the regular ones and reader macros. Reader macros are special/low level syntax in Clojure code. For example, the quote operator,

'
. Its use indicates to the Clojure reader to avoid the evaluation step of the form which follows the quote operator.

For example,

'foo
expression will produce the symbol
foo
: Clojure doesn't attempt to resolve the potential value behind the name
foo
. For me the reader macro constitutes the foundation of the language itself, and in Clojure whereas it is possible to do so in LISP.

From this point, the term macro will always refer to regular macro.

Macro: a "blur" definition

To handle new concept, it's useful to take a look at the definition of the concept. So here is my definition of Clojure macro:

Clojure macros are code that generate code.

That's it. Thanks for coming.
I'm joking, please bear with me.You'll find a more convincing definition from :
Clojure has a programmatic macro system which allows the compiler to be extended by user code. Macros can be used to define syntactic constructs which would require primitives or built-in support in other languages. Many core constructs of Clojure are not, in fact, primitives, but are normal macros.

It's (almost) always simpler for me to look at a concrete example and then reason about it. Let's look at the

when
macro provided by
clojure.core
namespace:

(source when)
;; => (defmacro when
;;      "Evaluates test. If logical true, evaluates body in an implicit do."
;;      {:added "1.0"}
;;      [test & body]
;;      (list 'if test (cons 'do body)))

At first sight, the definition of the

when
macro is very similar to the definition of a regular function except the use of the keyword
defmacro
instead of
defn
. Roughly, the macro definition skeleton is:

(defmacro <macro-name>
  <documentation-string>
  <meta-data>
  <argument-list>
  <body>)

For completeness, here is a simple example of the code generated by

when
on a simple example:

(macroexpand '(when true 42))
=> (if true (do 42))

The

macroexpand
function is especially useful to check the generated code from a given macro. From this first observation, some thoughts can immerge.

The first fundamental difference between macro code and regular code is that macro code is executed at compile time. Which means, before the writing of Java bytecode by the Clojure compiler, which will be effectively translated to Java bytecode.The second main difference is that the arguments of macro are not evaluated: they remain symbols in the body of macro. In the subsequent part of this article, a particular emphasis on this point will be made.Macro is the tool . Wikipedia defines metaprogramming as:
Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data.
Clojure macro takes as input any Clojure data and generates arbitrary Clojure code: full power.The talk introduces Clojure macro as a hook to the compiler. Macros are expanded/executed at compile time; it's relevant to see them as extension to the compiler: it allows you to define new syntax.

Build the BANG macro

This article don't have the pretension to learn you how to write Clojure macro. Many high quality materials are available online. If you want to master the craft of creating macro and decipher all notations it involves, you should read one of these links:
With only one of these resources, you'll feel fluent to write Clojure macro by the end of the day. By learning it, the main difficulty I experienced is to understand when to keep a symbol as is, instead of taking it's value in the macro body .Back to my use case, I want to create a macro to generate the side effect version of a function which change the state of my application (cf the snippet at the top of this article). To achieve this, here is first attempt:
(defmacro BANG
  "Define the side-effect version of a given function 'func-name'"
  [func-name]
  (let [func-name-banged (symbol (str func-name "!"))
        arg-symbol (symbol (str "arg"))
        appstate-arg-symbol (symbol (str "appstate-arg"))]
    `(defn ~func-name-banged [~arg-symbol]
       (swap! appstate (fn [~appstate-arg-symbol] (~func-name ~appstate-arg-symbol ~arg-symbol))))))

Writing macros is generally not as easy as developing regular function. Along the road, I intensively use the

macroexpand
function which takes a form as input and gives back the full expansion of it:

(macroexpand '(BANG add-bubble))
;; => (def add-bubble!
;;      (clojure.core/fn
;;        ([arg]
;;          (clojure.core/swap! core/appstate
;;            (clojure.core/fn [appstate-arg]
;;              (add-bubble appstate-arg arg))))))

As many Clojure instructions rely on macros, the result of

macroexpand
can be a bit confusing. As
macroexpand
does recursively all macro expansions, some implementation detail of builtin functions is exposed and this is generally not relevant when you write your own macro. To hide this complexity, you can use
macroexpand-1
instead as it does only one step of macro expansion:

(macroexpand-1 '(BANG add-bubble))
;; => (clojure.core/defn add-bubble! [arg]
;;      (clojure.core/swap! core/appstate
;;        (clojure.core/fn [appstate-arg]
;;          (add-bubble appstate-arg arg))))

The

(BANG add-bubble)
form expanded correctly to the target function definition
add-bubble!
: it works!

To comment briefly the body of

BANG
macro, firstly you can see the binding of
func-name-banged
to
(symbol (str func-name "!"))
. The function
symbol
allows you to . In Clojure, a Symbol is bound or not to a Var (a Var is basically a value). Through the call
(BANG add-bubble)
,
func-name-banged
stores a symbol with the name "add-bubble!":

(symbol (str "add-bubble" "!"))
;; => add-bubble!
(type (symbol (str "add-bubble" "!")))
;; => clojure.lang.Symbol
(name (symbol (str "add-bubble" "!")))
;; => "add-bubble!"
(type (name (symbol (str "add-bubble" "!"))))
;; => java.lang.String

Secondly, you can see local variables

arg-symbol
and
appstate-arg-symbol
which just store a symbol with a given name. In the body of the macro, these variables are used in the signature of functions and you can see in the macro expansion that the compiler resolves them just with there name (the string provided at their initialisation).

This is a way to manage situation where you want to use a free variable in a macro. A free variable is not bound (yet) to a value during the macro compilation, which is on purpose as the BANG macro generate a function, and so its signature.

As this situation is recurrent, you can also use the function

gensym
which returns a symbol with a unique name. If you rewrite the
BANG
macro using the
gensym
function, you'll get:

(defmacro BANG
  "Define the side-effect version of a given function 'func-name'"
  [func-name]
  (let [func-name-banged (symbol (str func-name "!"))
        arg-symbol (gensym)
        appstate-arg-symbol (gensym)]
    `(defn ~func-name-banged [~arg-symbol]
       (swap! appstate (fn [~appstate-arg-symbol] (~func-name ~appstate-arg-symbol ~arg-symbol))))))

(macroexpand-1 '(BANG add-bubble))
;; => (clojure.core/defn add-bubble! [G__7657]
;;      (clojure.core/swap! core/appstate
;;        (clojure.core/fn [G__7658]
;;          (add-bubble G__7658 G__7657))))

You can see that

arg-symbol
is expanded to
G__7657
and
appstate-arg-symbol
to
G__7658
. This version of
BANG
is completely equivalent to the previous one with less characters and also a bit less readable when you look at the macro expansion. If you don't care about a particular name behind a symbol, the use of
gensym
is perfectly fine.

If you want to learn more about the use of generated symbols, I recommend this article which also gives a lot of material about the use of macro itself.

In this article, I prefer to have a

BANG
macro with an easy macro expansion to comment, so I'll stick with the first version of it.

The current definition of

BANG
macro works perfectly for the
add-bubble
function, but its not generic enough for my application. I have other functions which take more than one argument as input, not just one. The number of arguments accepted as input by a function is called arity in Clojure.

The

add-bubble!
function need only one argument: the bubble to add to the global state
appstate
. But what if the function I deal with takes more than one argument as input. For example the function
update-bubble
takes 2 arguments as input: a bubble-id and an hashmap of attributes to update a given bubble.

The big deal here is to find a mechanism to retrieve the number of argument(s) of the input function passed to the

BANG
macro. Another formulation would be: "How to deal with functions of arbitrary arity with the
BANG
macro?".

All the magic of Clojure macros lives in the fact that you can access to thins kind of information at compile time: the programmer has the power to handle them at his/her convenience.

Handle n-arity by the BANG macro

A really interesting feature of Clojure for me is the accessibility to metadata information. Every time you define a variable through

def
, some metadata is automatically attach to this variable.

The describes the standard information that are defined and their meaning. You can inspect these metadata with

meta
function:

(type (var add-bubble))
;; => clojure.lang.Var
(meta (var add-bubble))
;; => {:private true,
;;     :arglists ([appstate bubble]),
;;     :line 12,
;;     :column 1,
;;     :file ".../clojurescript macro not so long journey/part2/appstate/src/appstate.clj",
;;     :name add-bubble,
;;     :ns #namespace[core]}

You can call

meta
only on a value of type Var. To get a Var from a Symbol, you just have to use the var function. Its documentation says:

(doc var)
;; => var
;;    (var symbol)
;;    Special Form
;;    The symbol must resolve to a var, and the Var object
;;    itself (not its value) is returned. The reader macro #'x expands to (var x).
;;
;;    Please see //clojure.org/special_forms#var
;;    The symbol must resolve to a var, and the Var object
;;    itself (not its value) is returned. The reader macro #'x expands to (var x).

What really interested me in metadata data information is the

:arglists
field as it gives you the list of input argument for a given function, exactly what I need to handle function of any arity within the
BANG
macro. Every function without side effect take the current application state,
appstate
, as first argument. To generate the side effect of them, I need their signature without the first argument:

(-> add-bubble var meta :arglists first rest)
;; => (bubble)

Voila, now I just need to update the

BANG
macro, and we'll be ready to wrap up everything:

(defmacro BANG
  "Define the side-effect version of a given function 'func-name'"
  [func-name]
  (let [func-name-banged (symbol (str func-name "!"))
        appstate-arg-symbol (symbol "appstate-arg")
        func-var (var func-name)
        arg-list (-> func-var meta :arglists first rest)
        ]
    `(defn ~func-name-banged [~@arg-list]
       (swap! appstate (fn [~appstate-arg-symbol] (~func-name ~appstate-arg-symbol ~@arg-list))))
    ))
But when I compiled this macro, I get a weird and mysterious error message:
1. Caused by java.lang.RuntimeException
Unable to resolve var: func-name in this context

For an unknown reason, I cannot call the

var
function in a macro definition. After tinkering the code for a moment, I got more error just as mysterious as each other.

At this point, I understood my vision of the puzzle was not complete, something was missing and I had to dig deeper or ask for help. Some moment later, I found which is relative to my issue. This question is about getting a var value in the body of a macro. Especially, in the given answer, a function

resolve
, that I were not aware of, is used. Let's take a look at the documentation of this function:

(doc resolve)
;; => clojure.core/resolve
;;      ([sym] [env sym])
;;        same as (ns-resolve *ns* symbol) or (ns-resolve *ns* &env symbol)
(doc ns-resolve)
;; => clojure.core/ns-resolve
;;      ([ns sym] [ns env sym])
;;        Returns the var or Class to which a symbol will be resolved in the
;;        namespace (unless found in the environment), else nil.  Note that
;;        if the symbol is fully qualified, the var/Class to which it resolves
;;        need not be present in the namespace.

From a given Symbol, the

resolve
function look up a Var in the namespace from where it is called. In fact, this is what I needed for my
BANG
macro. To convince myself of the good behaviour of the this function, I like to write dummy examples:

(def dummy-arg 42)
(defmacro dummy-m [arg]
  (resolve arg))

(macroexpand '(defmacro dummy-m [arg]
                (resolve arg)))
;; => (do
;;      (clojure.core/defn dummy-m ([&form &env arg] (resolve arg)))
;;      (. #'m (setMacro))
;;      #'m)

(dummy-m dummy-arg)
;; => #'core/dummy-arg

What is interesting is the above snippet is the expansion of the definition of the

dummy-m
macro. You can see the use of special arguments
&form
and
&env
. You can use
&form
to see how a macro has been called:

(defmacro dummy-m1 [arg]
  (prn &form))

(dummy-m1 (+ 3 2 doesn't-exist))
;; => (dummy-m1 (+ 3 2 doesn't-exist))

The

&env
variable let you inspect the current compiler environment for the macro:

(defmacro dummy-m2 []
  (prn &env))

(dummy-m2)
;; => nil

By default, the

&env
variable is nil. This is not the main track of this article, so if you want to learn more about it, I recommend . Anyway, the only point I would like to emphasize here is that Clojure macro is definitely a hook to the Clojure compiler and this tiny examples give you some hint on how you can tackle this topic.

Finally, to fix the

BANG
macro, I have to use the
resolve
function instead of
var
:

(defmacro BANG
  "Define the side-effect version of a given function 'func-name'"
  [func-name]
  (let [func-name-banged (symbol (str func-name "!"))
        appstate-arg-symbol (symbol "appstate-arg")
        func-var (resolve func-name)
        arg-list (-> func-var meta :arglists first rest)]
    `(defn ~func-name-banged [~@arg-list]
       (swap! appstate (fn [~appstate-arg-symbol] (~func-name ~appstate-arg-symbol ~@arg-list))))
    ))

(macroexpand-1 '(BANG add-bubble))
;; => (clojure.core/defn add-bubble! [bubble]
;;      (clojure.core/swap! core/appstate
;;        (clojure.core/fn [appstate-arg]
;;          (add-bubble appstate-arg bubble))))

The

BANG
macro can now handle functions of any arity.

Conclusion

Clojure macro is really a powerful feature: it allows you generate arbitrary code from Clojure data. But as you saw through this article, it can be a bit sporty to get it works, the way you want.

Except for the

resolve
trick, there are really good materials around the Clojure macro feature in different books/blog posts and as I said, after reading one of this documentation you'll be comfortable to write your own macro by the end of the day.

Learning Clojure macro was a preliminary step to tackle serenely the ClojureScript macro feature. Some subtle differences exist between those two but this is another story that I'll go through in the last article of this serie.
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