_Comment made by: wagjo_
Type hinting is a very intricate part of Clojure but you can almost always apply a *'place hint on a symbol'* idiom. Type hinting on an arg vector must be done only in two cases:
- primitive hints
- different return classes for different arities
In the first case, compiler needs type hints when compiling fn* (see [1]), not later, thus you must specify them on arg vector.
Second case, which is the issue discussed here, must be used only when defining with defn. Compiler first looks for the tag in the metadata of a var, and if it does not find one, it has a special case in which it looks for a return class inside :arglist metadata. This is clearly a very special case [2] to handle situations where you have different return classes for different arities. Obviously, using def instead of defn won't create an :arglist metadata for you thus you see a reflection warning. Example:
user=> (def f2 (fn ^java.util.LinkedList [coll] (java.util.LinkedList. coll)))
#'user/f2
user=> (.size (f2 [2 3 4]))
Reflection warning, /tmp/form-init.clj:1:1 - reference to field size can't be resolved.
3
user=> (alter-meta! #'f2 assoc :arglists '(^java.util.LinkedList [coll]))
{:ns #<Namespace user>, :name f2, :file "/tmp/form-init.clj", :column 1, :line 1, :arglists ([coll])}
user=> (.size (f2 [2 3 4]))
3
BTW CLJ-1491 has a discussion slightly relevant to this topic.
[1]
https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/03cd9d159a2c49a21d464102bb6d6061488b4ea2/src/jvm/clojure/lang/Compiler.java#L5134
[2]
https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/03cd9d159a2c49a21d464102bb6d6061488b4ea2/src/jvm/clojure/lang/Compiler.java#L3572
