adventures in making stuff with Daniel Higginbotham

How Clojure Babies are Made: Leiningen's Trampoline

23 March 2013

In the last "How Clojure Babies are Made" article I hinted that Leiningen avoids waste by using a trampoline. In this installment of this awkwardly-named Clojure series, you'll learn what the trampoline does and how it does it.

The Rationale Behind the Trampoline

I know what you're thinking, wise-hearted reader. "Why would anyone need to provide a rationale for a trampoline? That's like trying to give a reason for rainbows, or a newborn's laughter, or Michael Jackson's Thriller."

Allow me to explain myself. lein trampoline does indeed give you a feeling of weightless freedom, just not in the way that you're used to.

See, whenever you use Leiningen to run code from your project, you end up with two Java processes running. Each process loads a separate instance of the JVM. We saw this in the previous article in the output of ps | grep lein. The first process is for Leiningen itself, and it's responsible for setting up everything necessary for your project code to run. The second process is where your code actually executes. If you were to run lein -h, you would only start one Java process, as none of your project code would need to be executed.

Leiningen starts a separate process for your project in order to enforce isolation. This is because Leiningen is a true gentleman who does not allow his namespaces and dependencies (like, say, a completely different version of Clojure) to interfere with your meticulously hand-crafted, artisinal program.

However, like a doting father, the Leiningen process continues to stay open for the entire duration of your program's execution. If you have a long-running process, like a web server for your Justin Bieber fan site, then Leiningen stays open the whole time consuming memory that could be put to use in compositing images of the Biebs with hearts all over them.

This is where the trampoline comes into play. It allows the Leiningen process to exit completely before your project's process starts. Now, instead of two JVM's running, you only have one.

I think the name "trampoline" was chosen to evoke an image of Leiningen providing a launching point for your program. However, I choose to envision the trampoline process as follows:

  1. Leiningen takes your program, which is embodied as one of those cymbal-clanging monkeys with unsettling eyes, and winds it up.
  2. Leiningen gingerly places the wind-up monkey which is your program on the floor of a cozy Hobbit hole.
  3. Leiningen steps outside and mounts a gigantic trampoline in Bilbo's front yard.
  4. Leiningen takes two warm-up bounces and then, with a mighty "Hyup!", rockets himself into the sky, his mustaches flapping in the wind. He grows smaller and smaller until, with a bright sparkle, he disappears entirely.
  5. Your cymbal-clanging web server starts up, allowing users to profess their undying love for teenage pop stars.

How lein trampoline Works

Though you don't really need to understand how lein trampoline works in order to use it, I think it's pretty cool. Below I walk you through it step by step, with relevant code. We'll be using the project under leiningen/lein-build of the make-a-clojure-baby github repo.

  1. Run lein trampoline run from the command line. If you're on a linux machine, this executes a bash script. This script is probably at ~/bin/lein on your system.

  2. The bash script sets the TRAMPOLINE_FILE environment variable to a path. Later in this process, Leiningen will write a command to this file. Here's the part of the script that sets the environment variable:

    if ([ "$LEIN_FAST_TRAMPOLINE" != "" ] || [ -r .lein-fast-trampoline ]) &&
        [ -r project.clj ]; then
        INPUTS="$@ $(cat project.clj) $LEIN_VERSION $(cat "$LEIN_HOME/profiles.clj")"
        INPUT_CHECKSUM=$(echo $INPUTS | shasum - | cut -f 1 -d " ")
        # Just don't change :target-path in project.clj, mkay?
        trap "rm -f $TRAMPOLINE_FILE" EXIT
  3. The first Java process starts:

    /usr/bin/java \
      -client -XX:+TieredCompilation  \
      -Xbootclasspath/a:/Users/daniel/.lein/self-installs/leiningen-2.0.0-standalone.jar \
      -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 \
      -Dmaven.wagon.http.ssl.easy=false \
      -Dleiningen.original.pwd=/Users/daniel/projects/web_sites/make-a-clojure-baby/leiningen/lein-build \
      -Dleiningen.script=/Users/daniel/bin/lein \
      -classpath :/Users/daniel/.lein/self-installs/leiningen-2.0.0-standalone.jar \
      clojure.main \ `# clojure.main is the entry point` \
      -m leiningen.core.main \
      trampoline run 1
  4. This causes Java to execute the -main method in clojure.main, which in turn loads leiningen.core.main and executes its -main function.

  5. leiningen.core.main/-main applies the trampoline task:

    (defn ^:higher-order trampoline
      "Run a task without nesting the project's JVM inside Leiningen's.
    Calculates the Clojure code to run in the project's process for the
    given task and allows Leiningen's own JVM process to exit before
    running it rather than launching a subprocess of Leiningen's JVM.
    Use this to save memory or to work around stdin issues."
      [project task-name & args]
      (when (= :leiningen (:eval-in project))
        (main/info "Warning: trampoline has no effect with :eval-in-leiningen."))
      (binding [*trampoline?* true]
        (main/apply-task (main/lookup-alias task-name project)
                         (-> (assoc project :eval-in :trampoline)
                             (vary-meta update-in [:without-profiles] assoc
                                        :eval-in :trampoline))
      (if (seq @eval/trampoline-forms)
        (write-trampoline project @eval/trampoline-forms @eval/trampoline-profiles)
        (main/abort task-name "did not run any project code for trampolining.")))
  6. trampoline calls leiningen.core.main/apply-task but with a twist: it passes that function an updated project configuration, setting :eval-in to :trampoline. You can see this is the snippet above.

  7. Eventually, leiningen.core.eval/eval-in-project gets applied. The cool thing about this function is that it then calls leiningen.core.eval/eval-in, which is a multi-method. It has different definitions for :subprocess, :trampoline, :nrepl, and a few more. This is one of the first times I've seen defmethod "in the wild" and it really tickled my pfeffernuesse. Definitely check it out on github.

    Since we updated our project configuration in the last step so that :eval-in is :trampoline, the :trampoline method gets matched:

    (defmethod eval-in :trampoline [project form]
      (swap! trampoline-forms conj form)
      (swap! trampoline-profiles conj (select-keys project
                                                   [:dependencies :source-paths
                                                    :resource-paths :test-paths])))

    This updates the trampoline-forms and trampoline-profiles atoms within the leiningen.core.eval namespace.

  8. The trampoline function shown in step 5 above continues executing:

      (if (seq @eval/trampoline-forms)

    write-trampoline writes out the entire Java command necessary to finally run our project's main function. It writes this command to the path in the TRAMPOLINE_FILE environment variable set by the bash script in step 2 above.

  9. The Leiningen process exits and the bash process from step 2 continues. It checks for the existence of TRAMPOLINE_FILE, and since it exists, it essentially evaluates the command in it, kicking off the Java process which will run your code:

    if [ -r "$TRAMPOLINE_FILE" ] && [ "$LEIN_TRAMPOLINE_WARMUP" = "" ]; then
        if [ "$INPUT_CHECKSUM" = "" ]; then
            rm $TRAMPOLINE_FILE
        exec sh -c "exec $TRAMPOLINE"
        exit $EXIT_CODE

It's a bit of circuitous route, but Leiningen is not one to shy away from hard work!

The End

I hope you found this article interesting! The following topics are next on my list of things to write about:

  • How Leiningen manages dependencies
  • How to distribute a full application
  • How to distribute a library

So long for now, and may the lambda be with you!