clj-php

A very naive experiment on compiling Clojure to PHP. Hmmm...

Using

Simple example of defining and cailling a function:

(ns examples.basic)

(defn double [x]
    (* 2 x))

(println (str "Double 2 is... " (double 2)))

You can compile and run this with:

./bin/cljp examples/basic.cljp

Which should output:

Double 2 is... 4

Features

At the moment only the basic of Clojure have been implemented, but hopefully this will be a growing list.

• defn
• namespaces (with :use and :require)
• PHP integration

PHP Integration

Integration with PHP is handled (like in ClojureScript) through the php import to each namespace. You can then reference any functions from the standard PHP distributions.

(println "Date is: " (php/date "dS F Y, H:i:s"))

You can also include other PHP libraries and use objects, much like the Java interop provided by Clojure. Like this contrived database example:

(ns examples.objects)

(def cnn (DBConnection. "localhost" "root" ""))

(.query cnn "select * from table")

Including PHP Files

You can also include PHP files using :include. This is executed at runtime though, so should be used for any application bootstrap (like pulling in required PHP libraries).

(ns examples
  (:include "path/to/bootstrap.php"))

Tests

Tests written with Midje and PHPUnit, run them with...

lein midje
phpunit test/php

Disclaimer

This is not meant to ever be an actually useful thing, compiling Clojure to PHP is insane. It's just a learning tool for me to get more familiar with Clojure.

TODO

I don't plan to implement all Clojure features, some of them don't make sense (like Futures, as PHP has no thread support). These are some things I am looking to implement though:

• variable arity
• destructuring
• tail recursion
• lazy sequences
• macros