[HN Gopher] jank is now running on LLVM IR
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       jank is now running on LLVM IR
        
       Author : Jeaye
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2024-11-29 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jank-lang.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jank-lang.org)
        
       | chr15m wrote:
       | Didn't get to meet you at HoC but I wanted to say thank you for
       | working on jank. It's going to bring Clojure into so many new
       | places typically reserved for compile-to-binary languages.
       | Awesome work!
        
         | Jeaye wrote:
         | Oh, darn! Sorry to've missed you, Chris! HoC was a blast.
         | Thanks for following along!
        
       | bobnamob wrote:
       | Hi Jeaye, love what you and the other contributors are doing with
       | jank. The further proliferation of clojure dialects can't happen
       | quickly enough imo.
       | 
       | Do you have any "killer app" style use cases in mind for jank?
       | Babashka is great in CLI/FaaS settings, native Clojure is great
       | for "situated" programs that can afford a JVM startup and some
       | memory overhead
       | 
       | Which settings are you particularly excited to use jank in?
        
         | Jeaye wrote:
         | I may be biased, having built a career in game dev, but I would
         | love to see people developing games using a REPL. Many games
         | these days use Lua or similar for scripting logic, since it
         | doesn't need to be written in C++, it can change at runtime,
         | and it's reasonably fast. jank is all of those things, too! I
         | think, if we can get jank into Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, etc
         | so that people can use their existing tool set, write
         | functional code, and use interactive programming, it could be a
         | game changer for game dev.
         | 
         | Another great use case, I think, is desktop GUI dev. Outside of
         | Humble UI, which is still very new, Clojure's GUI story has
         | been quite bad. The native world has all sorts of GUI options
         | though and jank will be introducing them to Clojurists.
         | 
         | I think jank will be a good option for anyone who wants to use
         | certain native libraries along with their Clojure programming.
         | Jack Rusher, for instance, has said there are native graphics
         | libs he'd love to use and jank is a promising way to do that.
         | 
         | Finally, I aim to provide a cargo-like experience (if you're
         | familiar with Rust) for jank. This should make building native
         | apps easy. As I alluded to in my post, building C and C++ apps
         | is a pretty terrible experience. If jank can make that twice as
         | easy, for example, it could be that native devs end up
         | preferring it as their project baseline. Since jank allows for
         | arbitrary C++ to be included alongside the jank sources, and
         | required as though it's a Clojure namespace, it actually ends
         | up being a pretty sane way to write programs which involve a
         | lot of C++.
         | 
         | With all of that said, I don't imagine I'll be working on
         | anything other thank jank for quite some time. I think of these
         | mainly as things I'm excited to see others do. :)
        
           | aeonik wrote:
           | This is literally why I just downloaded it 2 days ago, but I
           | was having issues compiling it.
           | 
           | I'm very interested in simulation games with a lot of numeric
           | calculation behind the scenes.
        
       | jarjoura wrote:
       | Clojure is a quirky language, and I really enjoyed writing a
       | proof-of-concept microservice with it back in 2015-era when
       | everyone was shouting "Scala is the way!" I was able to prototype
       | with it and stand it up in a weekend. With the tiniest bit of
       | code, I had the exact service I needed. It ended up in production
       | after only spending a couple weeks, most of which was spent
       | wrapping my head around Docker and Mesos that we used to run the
       | .jar.
       | 
       | However, it's a quirky language. So, my quick take, as a glue
       | layer on top of the JVM, it was quite powerful, but jank has me
       | scratching my head. LISP doesn't really read well the bigger the
       | codebase, and as something to write software in standalone
       | environment, it makes me a bit hesitant.
       | 
       | I sometimes would hit walls, because in real world software, you
       | need persistent state. Functional software, for obvious reasons,
       | fights against that, and so modeling state is actually quite
       | difficult. This is where I think, as a small layer on top, it's
       | fast and effective. I would just not want to write more than a
       | few files with it though. Happy to follow along this project
       | though and see where it goes.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-29 23:00 UTC)