Manifold provides basic building blocks for asynchronous programming, and can be used as a translation layer between libraries which use similar, but incompatible, abstractions.

Manifold provides two core abstractions: deferreds, which represent a single asynchronous value, and streams, which represent an ordered sequence of asynchronous values.

A detailed discussion of Manifold's rationale can be found here. Full documentation can be found here.

Leiningen:

[manifold "0.4.3"]

deps.edn:

manifold/manifold {:mvn/version "0.4.3"}

Deferreds

A deferred in Manifold is similar to a Clojure promise:

> (require '[manifold.deferred :as d])
nil

> (def d (d/deferred))
#'d

> (d/success! d :foo)
true

> @d
:foo

However, similar to Clojure's futures, deferreds in Manifold can also represent errors. Crucially, they also allow for callbacks to be registered, rather than simply blocking on dereferencing.

> (def d (d/deferred))
#'d

> (d/error! d (Exception. "boom"))
true

> @d
Exception: boom

> (def d (d/deferred))
#'d

> (d/on-realized d
    (fn [x] (println "success!" x))
    (fn [x] (println "error!" x)))
<< ... >>

> (d/success! d :foo)
success! :foo
true

Callbacks are a useful building block, but they're a painful way to create asynchronous workflows. In practice, no one should ever need to use on-realized. Manifold provides a number of operators for composing over deferred values, which can be read about here.

Streams

Manifold's streams provide mechanisms for asynchronous puts and takes, timeouts, and backpressure. They are compatible with Java's BlockingQueues, Clojure's lazy sequences, and core.async's channels. Methods for converting to and from each are provided.

Manifold differentiates between sources, which emit messages, and sinks, which consume messages. We can interact with sources using take! and try-take!, which return deferred values representing the next message. We can interact with sinks using put! and try-put!, which return a deferred values which will yield true if the put is successful, or false otherwise.

We can create a stream using (manifold.stream/stream):

> (require '[manifold.stream :as s])
nil
> (def s (s/stream))
#'s
> (s/put! s 1)
<< ... >>
> (s/take! s)
<< 1 >>

A stream is both a sink and a source; any message sent via put! can be received via take!. We can also create sinks and sources from other stream representations using ->sink and ->source:

> (require '[clojure.core.async :as a])
nil
> (def c (a/chan))
#'c
> (def s (s/->source c))
#'s
> (a/go (a/>! c 1))
#object[clojure.core.async.impl.channels.ManyToManyChannel 0x7...
> @(s/take! s)
1

We can also turn a Manifold stream into a different representation by using connect to join them together:

> (def s (s/stream))
#'s
> (def c (a/chan))
#'c
> (s/connect s c)
nil
> (s/put! s 1)
<< true >>
> (a/<!! c)
1

Manifold can use any transducer, which are applied via transform. It also provides stream-specific transforms, including zip, reduce, buffer, batch, and throttle. To learn more about streams, go here.

Clojurescript

A Clojurescript implementation of Manifold can be found here: dm3/manifold-cljs.

License

Copyright © 2014-2024 Zach Tellman.

Distributed under the MIT License.

Support

Many thanks to YourKit for supporting Manifold. YourKit supports open source projects with innovative and intelligent tools for monitoring and profiling Java and .NET applications.

YourKit is the creator of YourKit Java Profiler, YourKit .NET Profiler, and YourKit YouMonitor.