4 ms·

This just reminds me of how much I'd like to see Clojure on LLVM also.

by Slackwise 12y ago

moomin 12y ago
PixieLang exists, and probably does most of what you'd want: fast boot, FFI and Clojure-style LISP.
- xaa 12y ago
  Thank you so much for this reference. The moment I grokked Clojure, I immediately thought "someone should port this to LLVM". The JVM is awful in a thousand ways, and it is quite surprising to me that Rich Hickey would devote so much time to getting many details right but get this big one wrong. Trying it out now ;)
  - hga 12y ago
    As much as I don't like Clojure on top of the JVM, I don't think you can say that the man who created the 3rd seriously successful dialect of Lisp made a big mistake/ I count "mainline Lisp", which ended with Common Lisp, and Scheme as the other two; others might count Autodesk's and Gnu Emacs' embedded Lisps. Clojure is even showing signs of becoming mainstream in a way no Lisp has been since mainline Lisp through sometime in the '80s, not counting Scheme's niches in language research and (temporary? one) education. Or perhaps even better.
    - xaa 12y ago
      I view the JVM choice as a pragmatic choice to encourage wider adoption rather than a technical choice. Possibly it eased implementation too having a high-quality GC, but overall the drawbacks are quite severe, because they outright preclude Clojure from being used in situations outside the "long-running server process" use case. It is even possible that he viewed the JVM as a stopgap to be abstracted out when and if the language got popular. It seems they are moving in this direction with ClojureScript. Clearly he made this decision thoughtfully and consciously because he was an expert in C++ before he ever wrote a line of Clojure interpreter, and could have made it native if he wanted. But the argument "Clojure is successful, therefore all his decisions must have been optimal" (caracaturing you a little bit) is obviously false. Replace "Clojure" with "Linux" or even "Windows" and you see the fallacy.

This just reminds me of how much I'd like to see Clojure on LLVM also.

moomin 12y ago

PixieLang exists, and probably does most of what you'd want: fast boot, FFI and Clojure-style LISP.

xaa 12y ago
Thank you so much for this reference. The moment I grokked Clojure, I immediately thought "someone should port this to LLVM". The JVM is awful in a thousand ways, and it is quite surprising to me that Rich Hickey would devote so much time to getting many details right but get this big one wrong. Trying it out now ;)
- hga 12y ago
  As much as I don't like Clojure on top of the JVM, I don't think you can say that the man who created the 3rd seriously successful dialect of Lisp made a big mistake/ I count "mainline Lisp", which ended with Common Lisp, and Scheme as the other two; others might count Autodesk's and Gnu Emacs' embedded Lisps. Clojure is even showing signs of becoming mainstream in a way no Lisp has been since mainline Lisp through sometime in the '80s, not counting Scheme's niches in language research and (temporary? one) education. Or perhaps even better.
  - xaa 12y ago
    I view the JVM choice as a pragmatic choice to encourage wider adoption rather than a technical choice. Possibly it eased implementation too having a high-quality GC, but overall the drawbacks are quite severe, because they outright preclude Clojure from being used in situations outside the "long-running server process" use case. It is even possible that he viewed the JVM as a stopgap to be abstracted out when and if the language got popular. It seems they are moving in this direction with ClojureScript. Clearly he made this decision thoughtfully and consciously because he was an expert in C++ before he ever wrote a line of Clojure interpreter, and could have made it native if he wanted. But the argument "Clojure is successful, therefore all his decisions must have been optimal" (caracaturing you a little bit) is obviously false. Replace "Clojure" with "Linux" or even "Windows" and you see the fallacy.