I'm very excited for Jank, I wish the creator well.<p>If I could make one tiny plea, it would be to focus on tooling too, and ensuring the experience for someone trying Jank out is as smooth as possible. Don't assume everyone is already set up with paredit and can fire off emacs chords without a thought. I suspect that Jank will be of particular interest to C++ programmers, many of whom are used to a very different dev paradigm.<p>The Clojure community has done a great job at trying to smooth out the rough edges of Lisp tooling, and ensure there are on-ramps for newcomers (e.g. things like Calva for VS Code). I hope Jank keeps this up, because those first impressions really do matter. I'd hate to watch people bounce off Jank because they get stuck on trying to figure emacs out, or because they get frustrated trying to keep parentheses matched in Notepad.
Related. Others?<p><i>I quit my job to work on my programming language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658898">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658898</a> - Jan 2025 (32 comments)<p><i>Jank: Programming Language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42477992">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42477992</a> - Dec 2024 (3 comments)<p><i>Jank is now running on LLVM IR</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276672">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276672</a> - Nov 2024 (16 comments)<p><i>Jank development update – Moving to LLVM IR</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845669">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845669</a> - Oct 2024 (49 comments)<p><i>The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493217">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493217</a> - Aug 2022 (79 comments)
I'm not super familiar with this project, so forgive a bit of ignorance on this; what does this buy you over vanilla Clojure and native-image compiling with GraalVM.<p>This is a genuine question, not meant to dismiss the project!<p>ETA:<p>Sorry, further down the article answered my question:<p>> “jank is also a good fit for any Clojure devs who want a lighter runtime without sacrificing JIT compilation, as they would if they used a Graal native image, or if they want easy access to native libraries for whatever reason.”
Looks similar to Clasp but implements Clojure instead of Common Lisp.<p><a href="https://clasp-developers.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://clasp-developers.github.io/</a>
As a long-time fan of Clojure (I've been using it to varying degrees since 2008 and it is my favorite programming language) I'm really excited about the interpretability it sounds like this will open up!!
>Seamless C++ interop<p>More detail would be appreciated, I'm not aware of any non-transpiling language that actually support full C++ RTTI/exceptions interop.
Always happy to see clojure on the front page, doubly happy to see jank! I just scoured the internet last week trying to find all the information I could on it.<p>As a clojure(script) developer of 10 years, I still try and avoid anything JVM related. Not that I have anything against the JVM — but I never did any Java programming, and to really learn about the JVM you have to learn quite a bit about Java… which is just very low on my priority list.<p>I have been dreaming about jank a little bit, so maybe this is a good place to ask the question, since I see the jank developer is reading the comments: would it be possible to write a module in jank that can be used in a Swift/iOS application (currently or in the future)? I assume so, but I’m not sure how accessible the outputs of jank are to other c libraries.<p>The reason I ask is I have an offline clojurescript front end. If I want native mobile apps, that means I either have to duplicate the logic, figure out some JavaScript bridge, use react native, or use dart — none of which seem ideal. Ideally I could just extract the critical business logic into a few modules and generate the header files for swift, import directly into cljs for web, and use as regular clojure for android.<p>Totally understandable if this isn’t a valid use case for jank, but it’s what’s captured my imagination :)
Curious what the story is for slotting Jank into gaming. Seems like a fit for Unreal, but I really love the Component-Based-Architecture of Unity. Would you get it into your Unity project the same was as getting normal C++ into your project?
Somehow I completely missed this. I mostly stopped using Clojure solely because of the JVM madness (yes, I know about babaskha, won’t use it due to the GraalVM dependency and possible Oracle tentacles lurking there) and have fallen back to things like Hy (which can be clunky but at least runs everywhere I have a Python interpreter). Something that has better Clojure-like syntax and uses LLVM aid very appealing, provided it can do (and serve) HTTP requests sanely and has enough batteries included.<p>Any good pointers to existing libraries to get a feel for the ecosystem?
I really appreciate the seamless rawdogging into C++ that this language provides. It’s the sort of ambition I’m here for.<p>Or, I find a lot of script runtimes in games have a strict boundary separating them from the native code (often for good reasons), but I wonder if we could integrate more tightly given static analysis has come a long way.
My only comment, there are must nicer system programming languages that could have been host, I am mainly thinking OCaml, as for me zig would have also been nicer than C++<p>My main objection to C++ is that in 2025 its not a language I would want to learn or use, nothing about its inherit qualities
This is very cool and I intend to check on it from time to time. I use Clojure (and ClojureScript) all the time, and while performance on the JVM has never been an issue for me (the JVM is an impressive piece of engineering), I'm always on the lookout for new things!
This is dope. I cant remember the last time I got interested in a language enough to want to try it, but this passes that hurdle. I'm looking forward to the first release.
Very excited for jank. I've been hacking together my weekend projects in Common Lisp for roughly a year. I've been wanting to look at Clojure as a modern lisp, but I want no truck with the JVM.
As someone who wants more in the space of Lisp-style languages with more interest in native, I'm going to be keeping an eye on Jank. Actually had this article recommended on my phone earlier.
As an ex-clojure dev that picked up Rust, I have no interest in this as long as it doesn't have ownership.<p>Once you used lexical scoping, you're not going back to dynamic scope either, the same goes for the ability to reason about "where an object currently is" lexicographically.<p>I think Carp (<a href="https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp">https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp</a>) is a much more interesting contender for a native clojure, simply because it has lexical ownership.