ClojureScript: Up and Running

Chapter 3. The Compilation Process

ClojureScript has a tight symbiotic relationship with other tools. This chapter will explain how all the different parts fit together and then demonstrate the ClojureScript compilation process.

Architecture

ClojureScript is a compiler—that is, a program that takes a “source” representation as input and emits a “target” representation as output. The source representation of the ClojureScript compiler is the ClojureScript language, and the target representation is JavaScript.

Unlike some JavaScript-generation tools and frameworks, ClojureScript itself does not do any “minification” or other optimizations to reduce the size of the JavaScript code it emits. Instead, ClojureScript is designed to work with the Google Closure Compiler to produce optimized JavaScript.

Google Closure Compiler

The Google Closure Compiler is a free, open-source compiler that uses JavaScript as both source and target representations. That is, it compiles JavaScript into JavaScript. Along the way, it can perform sophisticated optimizations to reduce the size and improve the runtime performance of JavaScript code.

Note

The fact that “Clojure” and “Closure” are homophones is an unfortunate historical accident. The owners/authors of the two projects have no relationship to one another. In this book, we will always refer to the “Google Closure Compiler” and the “Google Closure Library” by their full names.

The Google Closure Compiler can run in three different modes:

Whitespace Only

This ...