miniblog.

Prelude Many people think of nREPL as a Clojure-specific REPL server and that’s perfectly fine. After all the project started its life in the realm of Clojure and the canonical and most widely used implementation is written in Clojure. However, nREPL is much more than its reference implementation and a recent conversation with Phil Hagelberg, reminded me of the significance of this. The default network protocol (socket-based communication with messages encoded using bencode) used is simple, depending neither on JVM or Clojure specifics, thereby allowing (encouraging?) the development of non-Clojure REPL clients. The REPLs operational semantics are such that essentially any non-JVM Clojure implementation should be able to implement it, with allowances for hosts that lack the concurrency primitives to support e.g. asynchronous evaluation, interrupts, etc.