Fun with Clojure Macros

It all started innocently enough. I had a deftype that was implementing several protocols. I had written all of the protocol functions inside the body of the deftype. And even though each function, by itself, wasn’t overly large, the entire blob of code was getting out of hand.

Here is a tiny little example with some made-up protocols and a type that embedded the protocol implementation inside the deftype. In the actual code there were many more methods that needed to be implemented.

(defprotocol Proto1
  (p11 [this])
  (p12 [this foo bar]))
(defprotocol Proto2
  (p21 [this])
  (p22 [this baz bin]))
(deftype MyType [item1 item2 item3 item4]
  Proto1
  (p11 [this] ...)
  (p12 [this foo bar] ...)
  Proto2
  (p21 [this] ...)
  (p22 [this baz bin] ...))

A little investigation showed that it was pretty trivial to move the methods out of the body of the deftype and then just do something like the following. Keep in mind that the functions, protocols, etc., are just BS ones I made up for this post.

(defprotocol Proto1
  (p11 [this])
  (p12 [this foo bar]))
(defprotocol Proto2
  (p21 [this])
  (p22 [this baz bin]))
(deftype MyType [item1 item2 item3 item4])

(defn- mt-p11 [this] ...)
(defn- mt-p12 [this foo bar] ...)

(defn- mt-p21 [this] ...)
(defn- mt-p22 [this baz bin] ...)

(def p1map {:p11 mt-p11 :p12 mt-p12})
(def p2map {:p21 mt-p21 :p22 mt-p22})

(extend MyType
  Proto1
  p1map
  Proto2
  p2map)

That was all well and good, except for one thing. Before, when the protocol methods were all defined inside the body of the type, they had full access to all of the type’s data; e.g., item1, item2, etc.

This was no longer the case. Now every time that one of the type’s instance data was used it had to be looked-up laboriously like this.

(defn- mt-p11 [this]
  (let [item1 (.item1 this)
        item2 (.item2 this)
        ...]
    ...))

That was tedious. And even if I switched over to using a defrecord instead of a deftype, I had to do this…

(defn- mt-p11 [this]
  (let [item1 (:item1 this)
        item2 (:item2 this)
        ...]
    ...))

…or this…

(defn- mt-p11 [this]
  (let [{:keys [:item1 :item2 :item3 :item4]} this]
    ;; original function body goes here
    ...))

…or (the correct way)…

(defn- mt-p11 [{:keys [:item1 :item2 ...] :as this}]
  ...)

Now, keep in mind that, what I just showed you where the values were destructured nicely (and still giving access to the “this” argument, if needed) is absolutely the right way to do it.

But we played around with the idea of writing a macro that would automatically make all of the record’s data available to the existing functions. That turned out to be an interesting exercise and was a really small amount of code.

But it made us uncomfortable using the technique because, even though the resulting code was completely correct, it made it seemed a bit too much like magic. We agreed that it was a mis-use of macros.

This is the macro and its helper function.

(defn- map->letx [m & body]
  (eval `(let [{:keys ~(vec (keys m))} ~m]
     ~@body)))

(defmacro map->let [m & body]
  `(map->letx ~m  (quote ~@body)))

And you would use it like this.

(defn- mt-p11 [this]
  (map->let this
            ;; old function body goes here.  All of the instance data of the
            ;; record is available without going through "this."
            ;; e.g., item1, item2, item3, item4
            ...))

• Clojure
• Lisp