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The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

jank-lang.org

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#21

1+ hoping this project gets some momentum. I'd love to see a 'native' Clojure, something that operated more like SBCL would be amazing.

FYI but you can already natively compile Clojure code using GraalVM Native Image, provided it doesn't rely too much on reflection AFAIK.

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#22

1+ hoping this project gets some momentum. I'd love to see a 'native' Clojure, something that operated more like SBCL would be amazing.

Right? Clojure has so many good things going for it already that a step towards CL (native, image-based) would be the dream.

Why not use something like https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture (a Clojure "adapter" that runs on Common Lisp) if you want that?

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#23
post #2

I've been dreaming of something like this for a long time. While you can also make native executables with Clojure, using GraalVM, they tend to weigh at minimum around 10MB, and setting up the whole build system is also something I never want to deal with, so this is very awesome.

Is 10mb really a hurdle these days? Remember that since that 10mb includes loads of support infra (such as GC) the user code will be smaller too.

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#24
This looks so cool!

It does look like it has some technical similarities to Julia, with the LLVM JIT and such. It'd be great to see some benchmarks.

Also see the GitHub[0], which looks like the author put a ton of work into this so far. Very impressive.

That said, looking at the progress page[1], this is still far from achieving 100% feature parity. I'll be following it closely with my fingers crossed though.

If you want to support this, it looks like the author is also accepting GitHub sponsorships[2].

[0]: https://github.com/jeaye/jank

[1]: https://jank-lang.org/progress/

[2]: https://github.com/sponsors/jeaye

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#25
Love this. As a Lisper I’m always intrigued by Clojure but as someone with no knowLedge of or desire to learn to JVM I stayed away since I figured eventually I’d hit JVM questions/issues I frankly didn’t feel like dealing with.

Is it really 100 percent compatible with Clojure or is that just aspirational.

Also, is it the case that lots of libraries/workflows outside the core language in Clojure assume Java integration? I always thought a big Clojure selling point was the awesomeness of Lisp while having full access to the libraries of Java.

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#26
post #25

Love this. As a Lisper I’m always intrigued by Clojure but as someone with no knowLedge of or desire to learn to JVM I stayed away since I figured eventually I’d hit JVM questions/issues I frankly didn’t feel like dealing with. Is it really 100 percent compatible with Clojure or is that just aspirational. Also, is it the case that lots of libraries/workflows outside the core language in Clojure assume Java integratio…

> Is it really 100 percent compatible with Clojure or is that just aspirational.

Aspirational. The project is really early still, and in the middle of a grand rewrite so basically it doesn't build at the moment, see https://github.com/jeaye/jank/issues/7

Current progress seems to be outlined here: https://jank-lang.org/progress/

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#27
post #25

Love this. As a Lisper I’m always intrigued by Clojure but as someone with no knowLedge of or desire to learn to JVM I stayed away since I figured eventually I’d hit JVM questions/issues I frankly didn’t feel like dealing with. Is it really 100 percent compatible with Clojure or is that just aspirational. Also, is it the case that lots of libraries/workflows outside the core language in Clojure assume Java integratio…

The official Clojure (JVM) project has an official sister project: ClojureScript, which is designed to be compiled to JavaScript (and maybe Webassembly in the future?). There is a lot of code that runs with both languages and therefore I don't think you should worry too much about using Jank with existing Clojure/ClojureScript libraries.

Re: The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure

#28
post #7

It's extremely interesting, but it has a to be noted that, even though the main page claims 100% compatibility with Clojure, the status page lowers the claim down to 42%, while the GitHub page states you can't even build it.

>while the GitHub page states you can't even build it It states that it's not very buildable i.e. that the build process is very fragile. Building it with nix definitely works, I just tried it.

It might build, but can you actually execute something? According to https://github.com/jeaye/jank/issues/7, you won't be able to compile `(if true 1 0)` at the moment even.
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