I loved the literate programming style and the cleanliness of the FFI also.
Org-mode is even more useful than I had previously thought, the <a href="http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html" rel="nofollow">http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html</a> Babel addition also has a wonderful introduction and looks like an extremely powerful way of presenting code and commentary.
I applaud his effort (and this certainly isn't an easy project, he's a smart guy, etc.), but felt progressively more and more queasy reading this. I thought I could keep going even once I had realized the necessary lack of a runtime lambda or first class closure. When I got to the refcounting part, I mashed the back button in horror. Am I spoiled or what?
Very cool, and certainly not easy to pull off. It would be interesting to see a good native run-time for Clojure, essentially freeing it from the JVM (though, granted the JVM is driving its adoption). I fear that this is a lot of work however. The JVM may not be perfect for Clojure but a ton of work has gone into HotSpot. One way out is leveraging native libraries, extending the language with means to call into them. If that could be made more convenient, it would be incredibly powerful.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to me in looks more like a C++ code generation than real compiler.<p>I would like to see real effort to have Clojure on the bare metal, but that will probably have to wait until "Clojure in Clojure" get more priority on clojure core.