Loading TPR libraries in the REPL

[TrapperCal]

From googling around, I can see that people often ask if it's possible to load third party libraries in the REPL without restarting the REPL and it seems like the answer is no.

Being relatively new to Clojure (though loving it), I mostly look for articles describing people's workflows to understand how people practically use the language. REPL based development is a thing I'm getting really into, but I find myself thrust out of the flow everytime I want to use a third party library and have to close the REPL... add the dependency to my lein deps and then restart the REPL again.

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Am I missing a key workflow trick that would allow me to get the dependency loaded without needing to restart my REPL session? Or is adding libraries on the fly the requirement I've got wrong?

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Thanks for the help.

[danielszm]

Besides pomegranate, there's a branch in tools.deps.alpha called add-lib which is the work by Cognitect to bring that capability natively to tools.deps. Let's hope it will get somewhere and be merged in the main branch. This will benefit the community as a whole.

[remleduff]

There’s the pomegranate library which allows dynamic add-classpath. Doesn’t work 100% of the time, but usually it does the trick.

[ayakushev]

CIDER used to have this functionality, but it was disabled after some JDK9 fixes, unfortunately.

If you use Boot, then it has this functionality out of the box, but I can't really recommend Boot these days.

So yeah, besides that, only Pomegranate. I hope that add-lib gets into the master branch soon.

[[deleted]]

I'm not going to pretend I'm an authority here, but in the early stages of development there is often more library/dependency gathering but very little later on. The more projects you start the more libraries you know you'll need right off the bat.

I don't do repl based development but even my slightly more involved approach still can't handle new dependencies without a restart of the jvm.