Olical
Clojure socket server support
Is it possible to support a Clojure Socket Server ?
I have code running on a remote k8s pod and I think the easiest way for me to attach a REPL session to that pod is to give it an environment variable and connect to the socket. I have no trouble connecting (and I can port-forward it to make the port appear locally) and even running ConjureConnect localhost:5555 works! But then sending a form hangs and no command really work properly :(
I assume lots of functionality is impossible to implement (like interruption) but it would be amazing to have rudimentary support for sending a form + current namespace information to the remote process.
Personally, I'd recommend you add nREPL as a runtime dependency and start one of those, I've used that before to debug some prod things and it worked great. Although it does bring in a bunch of dependencies which might not be acceptable in some situations.
Socket REPLs are a neat idea because they're so simple, but that makes them pretty impractical as a dev tool. I found that they're better as a program to program communication channel that's built into the language instead of a developer tool.
They're also good as something you can netcat into to get a very bare bones REPL on a remote host in your terminal.
I actually wrote at length a few times about why nREPL is so much better for development than socket REPL or prepl but I can't find my comments / posts on the matter right now. Conjure originally worked with prepl (socket REPL + data wrappers for each message) in a previous iteration but I gave up on it, it was too limited. I even got some changes merged into Clojure to fix some issues with the prepl implementation!
So, if you absolutely need a socket REPL support, we can look at building a Clojure client that talks socket REPL, not nREPL (they're completely distinct and not interchangeable as is) but I'd advise against it. It'll be a whole new client that will be far less capable than the existing one.
I hope this helps somewhat!
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I don't think adding nrepl as a runtime dependency is a great option since at my company by default we share the same image in production and test environment :/
I think a socket repl is the least intrusive way to connect to a running app from my setup.
Thinking out loud, would be nice to have something similar to vim-slime - but with ability to send forms to that session instead. (and a keybind to send (in-ns) form inferred from current file)
IIRC sending a piece of text into a terminal is easy enough, but I'd like to reuse keybinds like "eval root form" and logic that detects the current namespace...
I wonder if it's better as a separate plugin or if this is just going to end up more effort than adding into Conjure.
I don't "absolutely need" it so don't feel pressured to implement this 😅