Rich Hickey is working on primitive support in the prim branch. As of now, one can write:

(defn ^:static fib ^long [^long n]
  (if (>= (long 1) n)
    (long 1)
    (+ (fib (dec n)) (fib (- n (long 2))))))

and computes (fib 38) on my laptop in 650ms where my (or even Rich’s) best attempt took about 2s! If I tweak the above code to use unchecked ops (regular arithmetic ops on primitive types in Clojure throw an exception on overflow, unchecked ones don’t), the performance comes real real close (< 5%) to the equivalent Java code.

What’s this ^:static thing?

Primitive (double and long only: they subsume any other type) args and return values are only allowed on statics (note that the return type hint is put on the arglist so as to allow different hints for different arities). Statics are still fns in vars but they are backed by a static method and, when called by name, a direct static method call is emitted rather than going through the var and the IFn interface — as such static calls replace direct binding.

(my-static 42) ; direct call
(apply my-static 42 nil) ; regular call through the var

About the syntax: ^:keyword is a new reader shorthand for ^{:keyword true} (and keep in mind that in Clojure 1.2 ^ is the new #^), and metadata are merged: ^:static ^long ^{:doc "docstring"} x is now equivalent to ^{:static true :tag long :doc "docstring"} x.

Interesting times… as usual in the Clojure community. Thanks Rich!

Follow up See here.

Update: I was wrong and Rich Hickey set me right: I didn’t measure the gains I’m expecting because the inline-expanded form still go through the var lookup. See here (or the comments) for real gains (around 800ms on my laptop).

This is a quick and dirty hack to emulate primitive types support for globally-bound fns:

(defmacro defhintedfn [name args & body]
  (let [iface (gensym "HintedFn")
        hname (vary-meta name assoc :tag iface)
        vname (vary-meta name assoc 
                :inline (fn [& args] `(.invoke ~hname ~@args)))]
    `(do
       (definterface ~iface
         (~(with-meta 'invoke {:tag (:tag name Object)}) ~args))
       (def ~vname nil) ; workaround for a soon-to-be-fixed bug
       (def ~vname
          (reify 
            ~iface
              (invoke [this# ~@args] 
                ~@body) 
            clojure.lang.IFn
              (^Object invoke [this# ~@(map #(vary-meta % dissoc :tag) args)]
                 ~@body))))))

As you can see the trick is to generate a dedicated interface and to inline calls to the defined fn to go through the specific interface rather than through IFn.

Let’s define a dumb numeric fn generating tons of calls: the fibonacci function! Below it comes in three flavors: hinted as int, hinted as long and plain.

(defhintedfn ^int hfib [^int n] (if (>= (int 1) n) (int 1) (+ (hfib (dec n)) (hfib (- n (int 2))))))
(defhintedfn ^long lfib [^long n] (if (>= (long 1) n) (long 1) (+ (lfib (dec n)) (lfib (- n (long 2))))))
(defn fib [n] (if (>= 1 n) 1 (+ (fib (dec n)) (fib (- n 2)))))

And here are the timings:

user=> (time (hfib 38))
"Elapsed time: 2016.128098 msecs"
63245986
user=> (time (lfib 38))
"Elapsed time: 2896.46198 msecs"
63245986
user=> (time (fib 38))
"Elapsed time: 4704.449867 msecs"
63245986

Please note that hinted fns are still regular fns:

user=> (map hfib (range 10))
(1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55)