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.
I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.
Writing from scratch those Java libraries, including a good quality AOT compiler and GC is not something to do as hobby on the weekends.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.