Clojure Test Suite Compatibility

Bara Lang participates in the cross-dialect jank-lang/clojure-test-suite — the standard Clojure compliance test suite that validates behavior across all Clojure dialects.

Supported Dialects

The Clojure Test Suite is officially maintained for these dialects:

Dialect	Status	Runtime
Clojure (JVM)	✅ Official	JVM
ClojureScript	✅ Official	JavaScript / Node.js
Babashka	✅ Official	GraalVM native-image
Clojure CLR	✅ Official	.NET CLR
Basilisp	✅ Official	Python
Bara Lang	🚀 Candidate	Nim → C → Native

Quick Start

1. Clone the Test Suite

git clone https://github.com/jank-lang/clojure-test-suite.git /tmp/clojure-test-suite

2. Run Individual Tests

Use test_single.py to run a specific test file:

python3 test_single.py /tmp/clojure-test-suite/test/clojure/core_test/nil_qmark.cljc

3. Run a Batch

python3 test_single.py
# Runs: zipmap, zero_qmark, with_out_str

Edit the test_single.py file to add more test files to the batch list.

Test Format

Each test file is a .cljc (cross-platform Clojure/ClojureScript) file with a standard structure:

(ns clojure.core-test.nil-qmark
  (:require [clojure.test :as t :refer [are deftest is testing]]
            [clojure.core-test.portability :refer [when-var-exists]]))

(when-var-exists nil?
  (deftest test-nil?
    (testing "common"
      (are [in ex] (= (nil? in) ex)
        nil   true
        0     false
        false false
        ""    false))))

Reader Conditional Handling

Bara Lang's test_single.py pre-processes .cljc files, stripping #? and #?@ reader conditionals and extracting the :default branch:

;; Before
#?(:cljs :refer-macros :default :refer)

;; After
:refer

;; Before  
#?@(:cljs [] :default [1 2 3])

;; After
[1 2 3]

This follows the standard cross-dialect convention — each dialect resolves :default per its platform.

Current Test Scope

The test suite covers 212+ clojure.core functions and 8 clojure.string functions. Bara Lang is working toward full compliance.

See the Roadmap for implementation status.

Dialect-Specific Test Setup

For reference, here are links to the official dialect setup guides for running the test suite on other platforms:

Dialect	Setup Guide
Clojure (JVM)	clojure.md
ClojureScript	clojurescript.md
Babashka	babashka.md
Clojure CLR	clojureclr.md
Basilisp	basilisp.md
Bara Lang	This document

Last updated: 2026-05-09

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