clojerl VS cloture

Basically, you take a programming language and make it work on a platform that meant to be programmed using a different PL. Clojure is hosted by design - it's not Java, but can be used to program for JVM. It ain't Javascript, but can be used to target nodejs and browser; not an [official] CLR language, but you can write .Net programs. You can use Clojure to make Flutter apps with ClojureDart. You can integrate Python into Clojure with libpython-clj. Or write Clojure to target Erlang/OTP; or Rust; or R; There's even a clojure-like language for Lua - Fennel.

There's something about Clojure people like so much, they want it to work atop any platform.

https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS

https://github.com/scicloj/clojisr

https://fennel-lang.org

But there are also unofficial implementations—i.e. not JVM, JS, .NET—of Clojure for other host environments, e.g. Clojerl. And of course nearly everything /u/borkdude touches interops with something in some way.

Tail call optimization/elimination isn't a property of functional languages - there are tons of non-functional languages with it, like Lua or even C, when compiled with -O3, to name a few. Besides, Clojure is a hosted language, so it shares the platform characteristics, and recur is a language-way of providing a construct for tail call looping. Clojure on BEAM for example, supports tail call elimination, because BEAM does. And Beam is a quite functional environment ;)

Clojerl: an implementation for the Erlang VM. The reader conditional is :clje.

There's also an unofficial BEAM VM implementation

For reference, and to show that it's possible, you might be interested in how I did this for Cloture (Clojure in CL): https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture/blob/master/clojure/core.lisp

Why not use something like https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture (a Clojure "adapter" that runs on Common Lisp) if you want that?

Clojure on Common Lisp: https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture

It does not offer the full experience. It has no breakloop and no ability to browse and edit the live running environment. It has no ability to rummage around inside the dynamic environment of a suspended function call, much less to redefine the suspended function or the types of its parameters, nor to restart the suspended call. Indeed, the JVM makes some of that stuff really inconvenient to do.

You cannot do everything from the Clojure repl in the way you can from a Common Lisp repl or from a Smalltalk worksheet.

I don't know that the Clojure language design forbids it; you might, for example, implement Clojure on top of a Lisp or Smalltalk environment and hook up their tools to Clojure through its interop. That might work, and ruricolist has been working on such an implementation called Cloture:

https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture

But existing Clojure implementations don't have the full set of tools.