I'm still exploring Clojure + Qt Jambi as a nice way to build GUI apps. I have some code to upload, if I can ever figure out how github works. The learning process really never ends for a programmer, does it? Not that I mind it, I actually love it. I love learning new tools and new languages. Git seems interesting and so many people say such good things about it that I almost have to learn it now.

Anyways, anyone who uses Qt Jambi should be aware of issues with memory leaks. Turns out you need to explicitly dispose of toplevel Qt objects or else they're never garbage collected. (This isn't as bad as it might be... most Qt objects aren't toplevel, they have parent objects.) I made a long-running system tray app and I noticed it slowly but steadily increasing in memory usage over the course of a week. I added a few calls to dispose and so far so good.

On that note, while Clojure is awesome and I think a lot of people's "OMG it's on the JVM, run!" reaction is unwarranted, the JVM still does seem to have some memory issues, on my system anyways. You do pay a RAM tax for using the JVM. A simple Clojure Qt4 app that just sits in the system tray and checks my email every couple seconds:

  PID  PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  TTY      COMMAND
 3282  20   0  282m  54m  17m S    0  2.7  11:08.75 pts/3    /usr/lib/jvm/sun-jdk-1.6/bin/java ...

54MB seems excessive. I need to look into ways of reducing that. I've passed in all kinds of parameters to the JVM limiting the heap size etc.; it was actually MORE than that before, which is even sadder.

One of the things that's either really good or really bad about Clojure, depending on your perspective, is that it forces you to learn Java and the JVM better. You don't need much Java knowledge to use Clojure, but it surely helps as soon as you want to interoperate with Java libraries. As much as I dislike Java, I recognize the need to have a job and acquire money with which to purchase such things as food and shelter. Java is good for that kind of thing.