I love the language. I’ve never found a language where I found the learning curve so shallow for being able to do so much.
That said, I do find myself pining for the ability to easily compile a static executable (maybe with a small embedded runtime). Some time ago there was an attempt to port Clojure to Gambit Scheme, but that appears to have fizzled.
More recently, I’ve seen Ferret, which compiles a subset of Clojure down to C++. Also Joker, which is a Clojure-ish interpreter in Go.
Then there’s GraalVM, which I don’t trust, because it’s Oracle.
I feel like the relative lack of traction for non-Java / non-Javascript implementations is part of the brilliance and sadness of Clojure. Namely, the JVM is a rocket ship and a boat anchor.
Racket (modulo the uncertainty cast by the Racket2 discussions) and Gerbil Scheme both have a pretty good “distribute an executable” story while trying to introduce some creature comforts beyond plain Scheme. I suppose my ideal, would be something a little more like Clojure in terms of language, and a little more like Scheme in terms of deployment options.
most of the “port clojure to X” that I’ve seen are just top level syntax and don’t port the functional data structures over. Without those, I don’t see the point.
Beyond that, the land of libraries has sneaky little java dependencies scattered throughout. Clojure without the libraries isn’t very compelling.
As someone else mentioned, graal does a good job of making an “executable”
Compiling an static executable is also interesting to me. This is why I'm learning Common Lisp. Its syntax and semantics are not as beautiful as Clojure's (IMHO) but CL also has other powerful features.
I recently read about RUtils [1] which uses reader macros to modernize a bit the syntax.
That said, I do find myself pining for the ability to easily compile a static executable (maybe with a small embedded runtime). Some time ago there was an attempt to port Clojure to Gambit Scheme, but that appears to have fizzled.
More recently, I’ve seen Ferret, which compiles a subset of Clojure down to C++. Also Joker, which is a Clojure-ish interpreter in Go.
Then there’s GraalVM, which I don’t trust, because it’s Oracle.
I feel like the relative lack of traction for non-Java / non-Javascript implementations is part of the brilliance and sadness of Clojure. Namely, the JVM is a rocket ship and a boat anchor.
Racket (modulo the uncertainty cast by the Racket2 discussions) and Gerbil Scheme both have a pretty good “distribute an executable” story while trying to introduce some creature comforts beyond plain Scheme. I suppose my ideal, would be something a little more like Clojure in terms of language, and a little more like Scheme in terms of deployment options.