What the heck is a clojure.lang.IFn$LO?

lvh

2014-10-02 06:15

It's no secret that I love Clojure. Like any tool though, it isn't perfect. Today, I was trying to write unit tests that use clojure.core.async/timeout, so I wrote a test double analogous to Twisted's Clock. As I tried to with-redefs it in, I got the most inscrutable error message out: java.lang.ClassCastException: icecap.handlers.delay_test$fake_timeout$timeout__22934 cannot be cast to clojure.lang.IFn$LO.

Wha? I know clojure.lang.IFn, Clojure's function type, but what the heck is a clojure.lang.IFn$LO?

Searching for the term didn't give any particularly useful results. It was clear this happened when I was redeffing the original timeout, so I looked at its documentation:

clojure.core.async/timeout
([msecs])
Returns a channel that will close after msecs

Doesn't look too special to me. What's the type of that thing, anyway? Let's find out:

> (parents (type timeout))
#{clojure.lang.IFn$LO clojure.lang.AFunction}

Aha! So that is actually part of timeout, not something else wonky going on. What does the source say? It's a pretty lame shim:

(defn timeout
"Returns a channel that will close after msecs"
[^long msecs]
(timers/timeout msecs))

I mean, nothing interesting there, just a type hint.

Oh. Wait. That's not just a type hint. long is a primitive. Testing:

> (parents (type (fn [^long x] x)))
#{clojure.lang.IFn$LO clojure.lang.AFunction}

Aha! Due to a JVM quirk, functions with a primitive type hint are special. That works for doubles, too:

> (parents (type (fn [^double x] x)))
#{clojure.lang.IFn$DO clojure.lang.AFunction}

And multiple arguments:

> (parents (type (fn [^double x ^double y] x)))
#{clojure.lang.IFn$DDO clojure.lang.AFunction}
> (parents (type (fn [^double x ^long y] x)))
#{clojure.lang.IFn$DLO clojure.lang.AFunction}

Adding a simple type hint to the function fixed it. Success!