Clojerl: the expressive power of Clojure on the BEAM

Abstract

The development of new features and approaches in programming languages is a continuous and never-ending task, as languages are ultimately tools for expressing and solving problems. The past decade has seen a surge in languages implemented for the BEAM as part of a search to combine the fault-tolerance and scalability of the BEAM with a set of desired language features. In this paper we present Clojerl, an implementation of the Clojure language with a rich set of data processing capabilities and the expressive power of Lisp for the BEAM. The main design principles of Clojerl are to provide (1) seamless interoperability with the BEAM to enable frictionless interaction with other BEAM languages and (2) portability with Clojure to enable existing Clojure code to run on the BEAM with little or no modifications. We evaluate Clojerl by running a set of experiments that analyse the performance of eight most widely used expressions. While the results of complex expressions show that Clojerl requires further optimisations, Clojerl significantly outperforms Clojure in a set of basic expressions, confirming that Clojerl has the potential to provide a competitive performance while offering a rich set of programming language features.