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)