The Joy of Clojure

Chapter 12. Performance

 

This chapter covers

• Type hints
• Transients
• Chunked sequences
• Memoization
• Understanding coercion

 

Now that we’ve spent a book’s worth of material learning the why and how of Clojure, it’s high time we turned our attention to the subject of performance. There’s a meme in programming that can be summarized as follows: make it work first, then make it fast. Throughout this book, we’ve taught you the ways that Clojure allows you to “make it work,” and now we’re going to tell how to make it fast.

In many cases, Clojure’s compiler will be able to highly optimize idiomatic Clojure source code. But there are times when the form of your functions, especially in interoperability scenarios, will prove to be ambiguous or even ...