import and require for consuming the fruits of defrecord

[Matching Socks]

A recent announcement of Clojure 1.8.0-beta2 mentioned an interesting enhancement,

  CLJ-1823 Document new :load-ns option to defrecord/deftype

which I think means that "import" will make a record type fully usable without an auxiliary "require".  This would be an improvement (for Clojure), but it's not the same solution as ClojureScript.

Is eventual convergence of Clojure and ClojureScript record require'ment/import'ation envisioned?

[Alex Miller]

CLJ-1823 documents the change from CLJ-1208, which is really targeted at interop use cases where a record type will be imported and instantiated from Java.

The effect you mention is secondary and I would recommend that the bulk of the type you are using records, you should require the record ns and refer the constructor functions for use. In most cases, you do not need to import or refer to the class itself (in particular, I think it's a bad idea to use Java interop to construct record instances). The one place where it does commonly need an import is when you are using the record type to define cases for something like multimethods or protocol extensions. 

Because the new property is optional (and false by default), I would still recommend an explicit require to load the namespace before using the constructor functions.

I don't know of any discussions around this change re ClojureScript. Could you explain the portability issue you have in mind?