Since you're here ;) : I read on the alpha doc that protocols and other part of the clojure object model are not done yet - is your goal to include them eventually, or is there a part of the lore of clojure that makes them not indispensable ?
Firstly, historically, jank had a closed object model for performance, which I have blogged about here: https://jank-lang.org/blog/2023-07-08-object-model/
Over the past few years, I've been spending hammock time to find a solution to this to re-open the object model efficiently. I came up with a design this year which addresses the concerns raised in that blog post and opens up the object model, but jank today is still in a half-way state between the two systems.
Secondly, in the several years I've written Clojure professionally, I don't recall ever writing my own protocol, record, or struct. When I was first learning Clojure, I leaned on them more heavily, since I was coming from OOP land. But once I leaned into the pure Clojure data designs, the OOP side of things just stopped mattering. So, if I were to write just about anything in jank, I wouldn't intend on using these features. That alone has made them low priority for me.
But they'll be implemented. :) I'd estimate Q1 next year for me to tackle those.
I'm honestly extremely surprised. Protocols seem sort of essential if you want two different "things" to exhibit the same behavior.
The whole set of immutable datastructures are fundamentally backed by them (well they use Java Interfaces but its fundamentally the same). Not entirely sure how youd implement them without Protocols
Theyre also sort of essential if you want plug-in backends for any part of your codebase.
Im curious what your go-to is currently? Do you just write multimethods and dispatch on the inferred input type?
Also, as I described above in the blog post, protocols/interfaces aren't needed to implement Clojure's object model either. They're just one approach. They're the nominal typing approach, in contrast with something like the structural typing approach, documented in the blog post. For that, we use C++20 concepts for structural typing predicates.