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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with the JVM? The JVM is utterly amazing and you know very well that you can target native, even with Clojure.

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I agree that the JVM is an amazing piece of technology.

But the ecosystem that exists around the JVM also comes with both a bunch of awesome libraries, and a whole bunch of cruft and ceremony.

If, like Clojure, you're trying to pull in compatibility with JVM libraries, then you pull all that in. So now if you want a little C in your Clojure, you have to go through JNA or something.

I would like the option of going native with a Clojure dialect, without passing through either JVM (Clojure) or JS (ClojureScript).

Now there is Panama, and then GraalVM as well.

Plus OpenJ9, PTC, Aicas, Azul, and even the Java like MicroEJ and ART.

Many don't have an idea of breath and depth of Java ecosystem, and what guest languages can profit from.

Not to mention that you can

Compile JVM bytecode to Wasm https://github.com/cretz/asmble

Run the JVM on Wasm https://cheerpj.com/docs/overview

Now is always the great time to be using JVM tech.

Yeah, for a reason I have always wandered around JVM, and its counterpart CLR, unless requested otherwise, since 2002.

Have you seen Jank? It’s a Clojure dialect being written in C++ and designed for interop with C++ instead of the JVM.

https://jank-lang.org/

It's almost perfect.

If it were strict C in stead of C++ I would probably be in love.

You should meet this nice https://github.com/babashka/babashka !

It is Clojure written in Clojure compiled to native via GraalVM.

Speaking as someone who was using Clojure pre-1.0 through... 1.2? because I was so interested in Lisps and one with access to a modern library ecosystem excited me, I did not enjoy my time with Maven at all. It felt very janky. A second issue that I hear they finally fixed was Clojure still gave all of the low level parts of the error that were basically the guts of Clojure and had nothing to do with my code which I got tired of dealing with. Probably other issues I'm forgetting as I have not used it in a decade or so, but I just did not enjoy my time dealing with the JVM ecosystem.

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