dispatch-map

A Clojure library which provides the internals of Clojure's multimethods as a persistent, immutible map implementation.

Also includes an implementation of the multimethod macros and functions in terms of a dispatch-map and an atom.

Motivation

See https://www.brandonbloom.name/blog/2012/12/10/clojures-multimethod-dispatch-as-library/

Example

(require '[dispatch-map.core :refer (dispatch-map)])

(derive ::rect ::shape)
(let [m (-> (dispatch-map identity
              [::rect ::shape] :rect-shape
              [::shape ::rect] :shape-rect)
            (prefer [::rect ::shape] [::shape ::rect]))]
  (println (m [::rect ::rect]))
  (println (m [::shape ::rect]))
  (println (m [::rect ::circle] :not-found)))

Prints:

:rect-shape
:shape-rect
:not-found

IHierarchy Abstraction

Java's type hierarchy gets special treatment in Clojure's native multimethods via the isa? function.

You can now get similarly special treatment by implementing the -isa method on the dispatch-map.hierarchy/IHierarchy protocol. This is useful if you have a hiearchy defined by some other means that you don't wish to manually reproduce by successive calls to derive.

See the tests for an example.

Note that your -isa method must produce a result that is safe to memoize.

DispatchMapFn

This is how you use the custom multimethod implementation. The only compelling reason to prefer this over Clojure's native MultiFn or a raw dispatch-map is if you need to provide a custom IHierarchy implementation.

(ns your-ns
  (:refer-clojure :exclude [defmulti defmethod remove-all-methods remove-method
                            prefer-method methods get-method prefers])
  (:use [dispatch-map.multi-fn])))

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.