Clojure, Java 9, and You - Toby Crawley

Toby Crawley explores how Java 9 features like the Jigsaw module system and ahead-of-time compilation impact Clojure projects.

Java 9 will be upon us soon (currently scheduled for July 2017), and while it doesn’t include as many API changes as Java 8, it does include quite a few implementation and tooling changes, including: Ahead-of-time native compilation The Jigsaw module system String representation and de-duplication A new default garbage collector You’ll learn some of the details of the above changes (and more!), and how some of them may negatively impact your Clojure projects (changes to how reflection works, for example). But all isn’t doom and gloom! You’ll also learn about some new features that may improve the performance of your Clojure code at runtime (the String representation changes look promising, among others). Toby works for Red Hat, mostly writing code and then throwing it away. He is also the lead maintainer of Clojars and the co-author of Immutant.