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by ryanmjacobs 2023 days ago
> For example, I've had fewer headaches using the regular Java Kafka bindings or JeroMQ than by using the "Clojure-ified" versions of these libraries.

As someone who is trying to decide how to interop Clojure + ZeroMQ, do you have any pointers for working with JeroMQ within Clojure?

Yesterday, I was browsing/evaluating the Clojure libraries for ZeroMQ, and all them haven't seen git pushes in the last three years and have between 10 and 120 stars on GitHub -- but JeroMQ has recent activity and >1.8k stars, so I'd like to stick with that for sake of support/documentation/etc.

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(Caveat: ... not that GitHub stars are the best metric for quality... but they're not a terrible one...)
1 comments
tombert 2022 days ago
Honestly, I just went through all the JeroMQ examples ported from the guide [0], and translated them to Clojure. I added no dependencies outside of JeroMQ, and tried to port them in an as-idiomatic-as-possible way. It actually wasn't too hard once I wrapped my head around it, and it took me about 6-8 hours in total (spread over the course of a week or so), so not a huge time sink. This also had the (unintended) benefit of me getting pretty good with ZeroMQ (and networking patterns in general), so I think that time investment paid for itself several fold.

I definitely think there needs to be a better messaging with the library support in Clojure; as it stands, a Clojure newbie might (very reasonably) look up "clojure zeromq" on Google, get a crappy, unmaintained library, and dismiss the language as having "bad library support", when in reality most of the Clojure veterans that I work with do the same thing that I do: when the Clojure libraries are bad, just use the Java ones.

There are exceptions to this in rare cases; I haven't done a ton of ClojureScript, but the bit I have, I genuinely really liked the Re-frame framework. I'm not a frontend guy, so I'm speaking largely out of my ass, but I found it to be a lot more pleasant then vanilla React.

[0]https://github.com/zeromq/jeromq/tree/master/src/test/java/g...

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