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Clojure and Java data structures interoperability

21 Apr 2013

Clojure is a language designed to be hosted, this means that it utilizes all the power of the hosting platform without trying to hide or abstract it. This design choice has several consequences:

However, Clojure emphasizes functional programming and immutability, and this has to be taken into account when interoperating with code written in another language that works on lossy mutable state.

Using Clojure data from Java

Usually there is no problem in using Clojure data structures in Java code since all data types in Clojure implements the relevant Java interfaces like java.util.List, java.util.Map, etc.

Let's see the classes and interfaces hierarchies for the main data structures of Clojure:

So you can easily write libraries in Clojure that can be used from Java without problems. Clojure data structures outside the Clojure contex usually behave like regular Java collections, maps and sets.

Using Java data from Clojure

Usually, the other way around is straightforward too. But there are some corner cases that you have to be aware of when writing libraries that can be used from Java.

Idiomatic Clojure code often works on data structures through the seq(uence) abstraction. In fact a lot of higher-order functions in clojure.core just call seq on their collections arguments. But there are corner cases, and we'll look at one of them that I discovered recently when writing the assert-json library.

A corner case

Let's build a regular map:

(def m {:a 1 :b 2})

(map class m) ;= (clojure.lang.MapEntry clojure.lang.MapEntry)

(first (first m)) ;= :a
(second (first m)) ;= 1

Ok, so map when iterating on a... map, works on a sequence of clojure.lang.MapEntry. And first and second functions can be used on these MapEntry to extract respectively the key and value of the map entry. Easy.

Now let's try it with a java.util.HashMap:

(def hm (doto (java.util.HashMap.)
              (.put "a" 1)
              (.put "b" 2))

(map class hm) ;= (java.util.HashMap$Entry java.util.HashMap$Entry)

(first (first hm)) ; java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Don't know how to create ISeq from: java.util.HashMap$Entry
                   ;   RT.java:494 clojure.lang.RT.seqFrom
                   ;   RT.java:475 clojure.lang.RT.seq
                   ;   RT.java:567 clojure.lang.RT.first
                   ;   core.clj:55 clojure.core/first

What's the problem here? In the stacktrace we see that first calls seq on its argument, and seq on a java.util.HashMap$Entry fails miserably. Why? Let's read the documentation of this function:

(doc seq) ;-------------------------
          ;clojure.core/seq
          ;([coll])
          ;Returns a seq on the collection. If the collection is
          ;    empty, returns nil.  (seq nil) returns nil. seq also works on
          ;    Strings, native Java arrays (of reference types) and any objects
          ;    that implement Iterable.

Well, since sequence is a sequential list abstraction, every seqable data structure must be Iterable (or either a String or an array of reference types). If you look again in the Using Clojure data from Java section, you'll see that Clojure maps implements the java.lang.Iterable interface that in this case iterates on clojure.lang.MapEntry instances. These MapEntry objects live in this hierarchy:

And so MapEntry objects are Iterable too. That's why first on map entries works.

On the Java side? We already know that HashMaps are Iterable on java.util.HashMap$Entry instances. But these HashMap$Entry are Iterable too? Probably not, let's see the class and interfaces hirarchy:

Uhm, no they are not.

A better solution

The problem here is that to extract key and value from a map entry I used the wrong functions. first and second are more appropriate on generic sequences, instead for this specific task there are more suitable (and interoperable) functions: key and val.

(def m {:a 1 :b 2})

(key (first m)) ;= :a
(val (first m)) ;= 1

(def hm (doto (java.util.HashMap.)
              (.put "a" 1)
              (.put "b" 2))

(key (first hm)) ;= "a"
(val (first hm)) ;= 1

Wrap up

Clojure and Java are usually nicely interoperable, but pay attention to use the appropriate functions in Clojure to manipulate data structures when it's possible that your code will be used from Java.

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