Increase JVM memory when using Swank Clojure

When I am developing with Emacs, Swank, and Clojure I almost always need more memory than you get by default with "java -client" so I edited ~/emacs.d/elpa/swank-clojure-1.1.0/swank-clojure.el on my laptop permanently overriding the amount of memory that swank-clojure gives the JVM by adding one line:

(defun swank-clojure-cmd ()
  "Create the command to start clojure according to current settings."
  (swank-clojure-check-install)
  (if swank-clojure-binary
      (if (listp swank-clojure-binary)
          swank-clojure-binary
        (list swank-clojure-binary))
    (delete-if
     'null
     (append
      (list swank-clojure-java-path)
      swank-clojure-extra-vm-args
      (list "-Xmx1024m")  ;; MLW 5/11/2010
   ...

Two of my open source Clojure projects

I used Clojure in a few examples of my book "Practical Semantic Web Programming" (a rough cut PDF is available on my open content web page and the source code for the examples is available on github).

I also wrapped the Clojure natural language processing (NLP) part of the book code separately on github.

Both of these projects are just thin Clojure wrappers on larger Java libraries. That said, I am starting to use Clojure more on new projects so future open source projects will likely be pure Clojure.

Welcome to ClojurePla.net

I have been programming in Lisp professionally since 1980. Clojure is a modern dialect of Lisp designed by Rich Hickey.

In the past I have typically done about 1/3 of my consulting work using Common Lisp, 1/3 in Ruby, and the remaining 1/3 in Java. I still love these three languages but Clojure offers (at least for me) a single language that can be used for almost all of my software development needs except for simple scripting (when I use Ruby).

I have three other blogs: for general technology, artificial intelligence, and Ruby. I use my blogs to record useful programming tricks for my future reference and hopefully my notes will help other people also. I like to write about things that interest me.