Clojurians Log v2

[ANN] ClojureCLR 1.12.3-alpha2 released Some small changes: • Improvements in the type resolution code and automatic assembly loading that first appeared in alpha1. • Improvement in loading the spec library files. But the big change: improved typename syntax and resolution. • improved type alias definitions • ability to use typenames like String in generic type arguments with having to write System.String • ability to use the Clojure special type names that you can use in type hints, such as int and shorts directly in generic type arguments • no need to attach the backquote-arity suffix to generic types when the arity can be inferred. You can now do

(alias-type Dictionary |System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2|)
(alias-type List |System.Collections.Generic.List`1|)
(alias-type IntList |List[int]|)

and refer to types

|Dictionary[String, List<long>]|
|Dictionary[String, IntList]|

and write code such as

(def my-list (IntList/new))
(IntList/.Add my-list 42)

(In this example, using qualified method expressions). alias-type is a macro. First argument a symbol, not evaluated, second argument is a type. def-type-alias is a regular function. It might be needed in some situations. The following are equivalent:

(alias-type Dictionary |System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2|)
(def-type-alias 'Dictionary |System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2|)

I've written up an in-depth discussion of the what's changed here: https://dmiller.github.io/clojure-clr-next/general/2025/09/21/typename-syntax-and-resolution.html I still need to update the ClojureCLR wiki with the changes. (Brevity takes more work.) This is definitely an alpha improvment. (Though I do have a fairly extensive suite of tests, so it should be fairly robust.) Please give it a try and let me know how it goes.