what is next for clojure

[Tim McGuire]

What is the Clojure community working towards now? That is, what is next on the horizon for the language in terms of new features, fixes, and promotion of the language? Where do we see Clojure one year from now?

[Sean Corfield]

Clojure 1.3.0 is "Clojure.Next" and that's currently at Alpha 7 (and nightly snapshot builds are also available). The high level overview is rather brief and cryptic but the main points are:

Enhanced numerics / primitives - mostly about performance, to use JVM primitive types without boxing, but also consistency of BigInteger / BigDecimal

Overhaul Clojure build system / Maven / Hudson etc - doesn't really affect end users

Overhaul Clojure "Contrib" - in 1.2, contrib was a monolithic library composed of ~60 small libraries; in 1.3 "old" contrib has been broken into individual libraries and not all of them are being actively maintained for Clojure.Next - see the Clojure Contrib design notes for more details;

defrecord improvements - Java "bean" interop stuff

Lots of bug fixes and minor enhancements

You can drill into exactly what's being worked using this Clojure.Next JIRA Dashboard.

How stable is 1.3.0? Well, I'm using Alpha 7 for soon-to-be-production code - because I am relying on clojure.java.jdbc (a new contrib library) and some recent additions to core language around promised values (deferred evaluation).