Clojure/Android news: Google Summer of Code, 1.4.0 release

[Daniel Solano Gómez]

Hello, all,

I just wanted to announce a couple of things that may be of interest to
those on this list:

1. Clojure/Android now has Google Summer of Code student! Alex Yakushev
was one of the four students accepted for Clojure/dev, and I am pretty
excited about the work he will be doing over the summer.

In summary, he will be working on making it easier for developers to get
started with Clojure on Android. To start he is creating a Leiningen
plug-in for Android that should help assemble and deploy an Android
project that should include an nREPL server for dynamic, REPL-driven
development. You can read details in the blog he set up for the project
at <http://clojure-android.blogspot.com/>.

2. I have updated my Clojure fork with the latest 1.4.0 release. The
1.4.0 release has been tagged as 'android-1.4.0'. When I have some time
later on, I am thinking of modifying the build process to make some JARs
that may be of interest to Clojure/Android developers.

In particular, Clojure 1.4.0 introduces a new compiler flag to elide
some of the metadata that the Clojure compiler normally produces. In
some tests I have run of this, it results in a modest start-up time
improvment and saves about a half a megabyte of heap. I am considering
making metadata elision the default for the Neko compiler.


In conclusion, a congratulations to Alex. I hope that his work will
help make Clojure a more attractive target for Android development.

Sincerely,

Daniel