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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I'm not super familiar with this project, so forgive a bit of ignorance on this; what does this buy you over vanilla Clojure and native-image compiling with GraalVM.

This is a genuine question, not meant to dismiss the project!

ETA:

Sorry, further down the article answered my question:

> “jank is also a good fit for any Clojure devs who want a lighter runtime without sacrificing JIT compilation, as they would if they used a Graal native image, or if they want easy access to native libraries for whatever reason.”

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The two biggest things are:

1. You get a native binary without sacrificing interactive programming. With a Graal native image, all of that goes away. With jank, you can still REPL in, change things, JIT compile code, etc.

2. You get Clojure -> JVM level of seamless interop from jank -> C++. I am pretty darn sure that this will be unprecedented, given the challenges of the native space (no standard reflection, differing ABIs, C++ templates, etc).

Aside from that, jank is making some huge quality of life improvements over Clojure JVM. I've shared some of this already, but I'll have a post coming out EOQ which will demonstrate the difference in compiler errors between the two. It's night and day.

I'm looking forward to it; being able to utilize C and C++ libraries directly from Clojure is something that I could see being pretty valuable.

I've been debating trying my hand at making a simple game engine...it would be great if I could use a Lisp to do it.

You can use lisp with almost native C support, if you use ecl or gcl.

ecl and gcl compile to C. That's fine, but not necessary to merely use C libraries; for that you need a C foreign function interface (FFI), which most surviving CL compilers offer. C++ is more of a challenge, hence the Clasp project.

I feel like Clasp has huge game development potential but has gravitated towards science just because that's where it came from. Like surely one could use it to get good godot bindings for example, but I haven't seen stuff like that around.

> ecl and gcl compile to C. That's fine, but not necessary to merely use C libraries; for that you need a C foreign function interface (FFI)

Last time I checked, they also allowed literal C code inline in Lisp programs. That's a bit more than the other Lisps which offer FFI.

Did you look at Janet? Of course there are many other embeddable LISPs, but I think in particular Janet is a good, light, (subset of) Clojure-like language.

It is built into TIC-80 by default, making it already useful for (small) games.

https://janet-lang.org/ https://tic80.com/

You can compile a native program. Not one that requires the JVM. And it also interops with a number of more native graphical tools (as opposed to having other use things that require/work-from java). To those coming to this thread who might not be familiar with Clojure: Clojure already can sit on top of javascript (as Clojurescript) and there was work making it work on top of, if I recall right, some of the C languages. But those latter ones don't seem to be anywhere near the capabilities of this project.

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