Clojure High Performance Programming

Become an expert at writing fast and high performant code in Clojure 1.7.0

About This Book

• Enhance the performance characteristics of Clojure's features
• Improve the efficiency of applications and plan their capacity for deployment
• A hands-on guide to designing Clojure programs to get the best performance

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for intermediate Clojure developers who are looking to get a good grip on achieving optimum performance. Having a basic knowledge of Java would be helpful.

What You Will Learn

• Identify performance issues in Clojure programs using different profiling tools
• Master techniques to achieve numerical performance in Clojure
• Use Criterium library to measure latency of Clojure expressions
• Exploit Java features in Clojure code to enhance performance
• Avoid reflection and boxing with type hints
• Understand Clojure's concurrency and state-management primitives in depth
• Measure and monitor performance, and understand optimization techniques

In Detail

Clojure treats code as data and has a macro system. It focuses on programming with immutable values and explicit progression-of-time constructs, which are intended to facilitate the development of more robust programs, particularly multithreaded ones. It is built with performance, pragmatism, and simplicity in mind. Like most general purpose languages, various Clojure features have different performance characteristics that one should know in order to write high performance code.

This book shows you how to evaluate the performance implications of various Clojure abstractions, discover their underpinnings, and apply the right approach for optimum performance in real-world programs.

It starts by helping you classify various use cases and the need for them with respect to performance and analysis of various performance aspects. You will also learn the performance vocabulary that experts use throughout the world and discover various Clojure data structures, abstractions, and their performance characteristics. Further, the book will guide you through enhancing performance by using Java interoperability and JVM-specific features from Clojure. It also highlights the importance of using the right concurrent data structure and Java concurrency abstractions.

This book also sheds light on performance metrics for measuring, how to measure, and how to visualize and monitor the collected data. At the end of the book, you will learn to run a performance profiler, identify bottlenecks, tune performance, and refactor code to get a better performance.

Shantanu Kumar

Shantanu Kumar is a software developer living in Bengaluru, India. He works with Concur Technologies as a principal engineer, building a next-generation stack in Clojure. He started learning computer programming when he was at school, and has dabbled in several programming languages and software technologies. Having used Java for a long time, he discovered Clojure in early 2009 and has been a fan of it ever since. When not busy with programming or reading up on technical stuff, he enjoys reading non-fiction and cycling around Bengaluru. Shantanu is an active participant in The Bangalore Clojure Users Group, and contributes to several open source Clojure projects on GitHub. He is also the author of the first edition of the book Clojure High Performance Programming, Packt Publishing.