it would be nice to know what exactly isn't working out and what the problems with native-image was.
Coz i think clojure is as close to perfect, imho, as a language can go without selling out.
https://github.com/clj-easy/graal-build-time
This initializes Clojure classes at build time and it mostly works for pure Clojure code.
Doing complicated things (e.g. depending on native library, etc.) requires some tweaking. For example, a few packages may need to be declared as initialized at build time or run time, depending what they are doing. And any unresolved classes need to be added to reflection-config.json.
All these are easily discoverable if one talks to people in the Clojurian slack channels. Clojure is a small community, so it helps to be part of it, because there are not a lot of open materials on the Web.
except...
> mostly works
> requires some tweaking
> discoverable if...
I know nothing about Clojure but from your caveats I think I can see why he spent hours banging his head against a wall.
Reminded me Prof. Knuth trolling in "The Art Of Computer Programming" with an exercise for the reader to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. (:
Problem solved.
Compare it to something like Go or Rust where there are no hoops and they're both well supported on Windows and Mac. I haven't actually used it but I believe Zig has very good cross platform support too.
I could be mistaken or recalling outdated information of course, but that is what I remember from the last time I looked into it
I grant that it might be described thus if I started out with that stack, but trying to retrofit an older code base with it is, I have found, next to impossible. You have to code around the myriad gotchas as you go or you're never going to identify all those landmines going back over it after the fact. The errors and bad behaviors are too difficult to identify, even for the `native-image` tooling.
If you don't do what everybody is doing to solve a problem, then of course it is not a "solved problem" for you.
No, you don't need to code specifically for native-image. What are the landmines that you need to code around? Since you have not successfully compiled native-image by following common practices, you obviously don't know.