Clojure: High Performance JVM Programming

Performance miscellanea

Besides the major abstractions we saw earlier in the chapter, there are other smaller, but nevertheless very performance-critical, parts of Clojure that we will see in this section.

Disabling assertions in production

Assertions are very useful to catch logical errors in the code during development, but they impose a runtime overhead that you may like to avoid in the production environment. Since assert is a compile time variable, the assertions can be silenced either by binding assert to false or by using alter-var-root before the code is loaded. Unfortunately, both the techniques are cumbersome to use. Paul Stadig's library called assertions (https://github.com/pjstadig/assertions) helps with this exact use-case by enabling ...