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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

As someone who loves Clojure, I wonder about the real portability across host languages. Do you have experience with any of these other dialects? (beyond the obvious CLJS & Babashka?)

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I am developing a test suite for portability of clojure.core across dialects. You can find it here: https://github.com/jank-lang/clojure-test-suite

Currently, we have Clojure, ClojureScript, ClojureCLR, Babashka, Basilisp, Phel, and jank running the test suite.

I have only used Clojure, ClojureScript, and Babashka in production. But I am the creator of jank.

I’d like to say thanks for that - I’ve been using it on my IR version of joker: https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/go-joker/ and it’s been very helpful to pin down bugs.

I build and maintain Portal, which runs on multiple platforms including: Clojure, Babashka, ClojureCLR, ClojureScript, nbb, joyride, basilisp and soon jank. The main thing that's different per platform is the os/fs/http/ws libraries but the runtime state and serialization is all the same and reused across all platforms. Also, recently I was able to get most of Portal's reagent viewers, which were designed primarily to run in a browser via ClojureScript, running on the JVM for Server Side Rendering. Clojure is the most portable language I have ever used!

I am learning Clojure this week, and my test project is a calculator / unit convertor [1]. I wanted it to run in the CLI and on the web, so it targets several hosted platforms: Babashka / JVM / ClojureScript. It's a single code base written in cross platform .cljc files. I already have about 250 tests written for the abstract calculator API, run as a test matrix across platforms, so the project is already in a good place for testing a new runtime.

I just learned about basilisp from the parent comment, so I asked Claude to add Python support to the same .cljc files I have, and we finished the port in about 30mins, and then fixed Python specific test cases for another 30 mins, but now all of the existing tests are passing. That's impressive in several ways.

Portability is achieved by testing. You have to put the platforms you want to support into your test harness, and the earlier the better. A calculator is purely functional, so this is a fairly straight forward port and really easy to test for. I'm not sure about larger projects, but it seems like there is something seriously right about Clojure's design that makes this easy to do.

[1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/calc

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