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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case?

Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

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Clojure's first stable release was in 2009 so it's either very young or very old, depending on how far you zoom out.

Rust is exciting for use-cases that are very different from Clojure's, and the only thing I can say for Swift in this context is that I prefer it to Javascript, which I in turn prefer to other C-style languages.

I'm currently working on a single-person (but expected to grow) project in Clojure and really appreciate the concurrency and state primitives, the functional standard library, the ecosystem and community of high-quality standard tools and packages, and (while I seldom write them myself) macros, which enable you to you write amazingly readable code. The community has a strong preference to functions over macros, but used judiciously you can get things like Clojure's core.async. So you get the benefits of a Lisp without a lot of the drawbacks commonly pointed out regarding other Lisps. I enjoy it a lot.

Have been using Clojure in production for several years.

It is great language to work in. I have found it very suitable for solving a wide range of problems. Many companies are using it successfully.

Sounds like your view of reality is based on the HN hype cycle. As far as I can tell there are many more companies using Clojure in production than Rust. (nothing against Rust, but just as an example of the bias)

I think Clojure is doing just fine. I've seen it used in "real-world" proprietary software (custom-made for a client by a third party). It's just usually packaged as a jar file, so no-one notices unless you look for certain tells.

Currently using Clojure on a side-project. It makes me so much more productive -- a real win when I don't have a ton of hours to devote to a project due to also having a day job :)

If only I could find a day job using Clojure...

I've been using it for 3 years and as I get my teeth further into my current project, I am grateful for Clojure every day.

It just got old. Those who wanted to check it out already have, those who liked it either got a job using it or have spent enough time with it to get bored, and those who didn't have probably forgotten about it already.

People just need a change every now and then, you can't get excited about stuff you see or use every day after a while.

I felt like that, like Clojure was the future, around 2009/2010. But then Java libraries and their impossible stack traces got in the way.

I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.

There are few abandoned attempts.

Writing from scratch those Java libraries, including a good quality AOT compiler and GC is not something to do as hobby on the weekends.

Don't need all those Java libraries if you've got good FFI with C libraries.

Don't need AOT compilation; if you want performance, just stick with regular Clojure on the JVM.

I'd love to just see a small general-purpose interpreted Clojure (quick start up, small memory footprint, easy access to C libs), even if it lacked concurrency features.

For that I fail to see the point of why not use a Scheme or Common Lisp compiler instead.

Yeah, for native executables, CL and Racket are much further ahead.

Thank you. Though I really like having Clojure's:

* literal syntax for maps, vectors, sets, and regexes

* keywords

* clear separation of functional constructs (`for`, `map`, etc.) vs side-effecting ones (`do`, `doall`, `when`).

* large standard library of built-in functions, with overall fairly nice naming of things.

I've looked at Scheme, but it appears to be missing those things. I think some of them may be provided by srfi's, but upon a quick reading I couldn't make much sense of how to include and use them.

Racket is probably something you should look at. Im not sure it has all these things, but it is also a modern updated Lisp language based on Scheme.

Lumo (https://github.com/anmonteiro/lumo) or Planck may fit your requirements, though they lack a C FFI. They're based off ClojureScript/Javascript, and startup way faster than the JVM Clojure. Could probably try the node-ffi library with Lumo.

There's the abandoned ClojureC project (https://github.com/schani/clojurec). There's also JVM-to-native compilers like gcj or ExcelsiorJet.

But at the moment, it doesn't seem like there's an established way to do all that.

Hey. My attempted is not abandoned just sleeping :).

The best chance to get it is to extend something that is ClojureScript based. I think you can get pretty close to it.

My implementation was never really targeting production use, but rather exploring some ideas in the VM.

I would love to continue working on it, but I simply do not have time for such a project.

See github.com/clojit if you are interested.

Yep, I'd love something like Clojure with an implementation/tooling like Go's.

I think that you are right that Rust, Swift, etc. have the hype now.

In my mind, this is a product of containerization. Java solved a lot of problems that we faced with deployment. Containers have made deployment even simpler, and suddenly the Java runtime is no longer as valuable as it once was. Furthermore, in a service-oriented architecture we don't really need too much interop with existing code.

I think that Clojure is a fantastic language, and I use it for my side projects as much as I can. But the promises made by Clojure dont sound as sexy as they did several years ago, hence the lack of hype.

I feel like every new language has a honeymoon period. Clojure is still alive and well (and growing bigger consistently) but it doesn't have that new language hype anymore.

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