jank VS neil

There's an effort afoot to bring this to the Clojure world, with the lovely name jank: https://jank-lang.org

I also liked that reference since I had not heard of Jank before. It is a work in progress so I just added a calendar entry for 9 months from now to check it out. https://jank-lang.org/

There will be a lot of room for this, once I build out more of the features. In particular, there will be a lot of Clojure libraries which need to gain jank support. Clojure doesn't require "porting", so to speak, since it has a special .cljc file which can use reader conditionals to check the host that it's in (clj, cljs, cljr, jank, etc). So anywhere those libs are using Java interop, we'd need to wrap it to use native interop instead.

On the compiler and tooling itself, I have some open issues here: https://github.com/jank-lang/jank/issues

The vast majority of it is heavy C++ work, though. Outside of that, the biggest gains will come from time spent on packaging, distribution, and testing on various platforms.

And if none of that sounds interesting or applicable, don't worry. Just be sure to join the Slack channel and hang out with us. :)

On the top of using C++ for scripting, and related to the discussion of CERN's ROOT/Cling, I am developing a Clojure dialect on C++/LLVM called jank: https://jank-lang.org/

jank is a true Clojure, meaning you get interactive, REPL-based development and a whole stdlib of persistent, immutable data structures and functions to transform them. But it's also C++, so you can write inline C++ within your jank source, and interpolate jank values within that. You can link with existing native code using LLVM and you can embed jank into your existing native projects to use for scripting.

jank is pre-alpha, right now, and I've only been showing it to Clojure devs so far, but there's a huge audience of C++ devs which may be interested in introducing Clojure to their native code.

jank (https://jank-lang.org/) is a Clojure dialect on LLVM with C++ interop. In this talk, Jeaye will cover jank's use cases, some challenges around building a native Clojure dialect, and some insights about Clojure itself found only by spelunking deep into the Clojure compiler.

I wonder if Jank [1] could be such a Lisp? I haven't played around with it, but I really like the idea and would love to see it get more traction.

[1]: https://jank-lang.org/

This isn't usable yet, but in active development by the author, and looks promising: https://jank-lang.org/

Jank looks pretty legit: https://jank-lang.org/

So neil has a bunch of other features like project scaffolding, building, testing, adding license, etc. I really recommend you take a deep look at the repository and learn all the automatized possibilities that neil adds to your project.

Check out neil. It makes creating new deps.edn-based projects easy. It also has commands to add deps incrementally to your deps.edn with neil dep add and helps you tag new releases with neil version. You can run it in a REPL if you want, but as you can see below, it runs pretty fast in the shell. $ brew install babashka/brew/neil $ time neil new scratch play Creating project from org.corfield.new/scratch in play neil new scratch play 0.09s user 0.06s system 54% cpu 0.280 total

Full-featured test runner: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha

If you install neil (https://github.com/babashka/neil), you can do `neil add test` which will automatically set up cognitect-labs/test-runner in your project. Then you can run tests with `neil test` (just an alias, you don't have to use it).

> I used Kit to bootstrap this project and the way it set up tests doesn't even work, but this was what most people recommended to me for starting a Clojure project

I don't really like the approach that Kit takes and prefer something more opinionated like Biff. I'd love to hear your feedback if you do end up trying out Biff.

For some common tasks, neil is also an option.

Let's setup a basic project that includes a logger. I think the nicest way to get a new project up is with one of the tools that Borkdude has created, called neil. If you have this installed, just run the following in an empty directory:

When I see legit anger and frustration in these comments, I also think about the newcomers who might be turned off by the funky syntax just to generate a template. That said, my solution to this wasn't to add another complaint to the thread, but to add the neil new command to solve this problem for tools.deps going forward.

There is also neil which offers some features to make working with deps.edn a little easier.