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Comment by Jeaye | Hacker News Reader

I expect that jank will be migrating from C++ to Rust, at some point. https://github.com/jank-lang/jank

That’s really interesting, as a long time clojurist and recent rust user. Can you expand on that, or is it too early days?

jank is the native Clojure dialect on LLVM, with seamless C++ interop. You get full interactive dev, REPL support, etc while having native binaries, ability to JIT compile C++ code along with your Clojure sources, ability to load arbitrary .o and .so files, etc.

It'll have its first alpha release this year. It's currently written in C++, but will be migrated to Rust piece by piece, either once we find a champion to lead it or once we reach Clojure parity and I can focus on it. C++ interop will remain, but we'll benefit from Rust's memory safety and improved dev tooling.

https://jank-lang.org/blog/2025-01-10-i-quit-my-job/

> REPL support

I randomly came across the talk from the founder, and their reasoning for this was awesome: basically creating a C++ REPL for the science community (and the rest of us by happy accident).

You're replying to them ;)

They would hardly gain anything and lose access to 40 years of libraries.

Aren't they calling C++ functions via LLVM? Their implementation language shouldn't affect their ability to _generate_ code that uses the C++ ABI.

If it is a Clojure dialect, implementated on top of a compiler construction kit written in C++, generating C++, and calling into C++ libraries, what is the benefit of rewriting part of it in Rust, complicating the whole toolchain, only to write some blog post about the rewrite?

If it is about additional safety, in any regard, self hosting would be the answer, not Rust.

One of the main goals of the project is to bring REPL workflows to C++: https://youtu.be/ncYlHfK25i0?si=rmzp5In3sv3IFlvA&t=965

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