35 comments

  • ingy 1 day ago
    Try out this Wasm browser REPL https://gloathub.org/repl/

    Gloat is a Glojure AOT automation tool. I worked with James Hamlin to get Glojure AOT going last summer and have been moving it forward since. I've also been working with marcingas (nooga) to get Gloat/Glojure/let-go all cooperating.

  • veqq 1 day ago
    Nice! I recently played around with a Lisp syntax for Go semantics: https://codeberg.org/veqq/Joe

    As far as JVM-free Clojure-like, Janet is really nice. I've been using it in production for a while: https://janet-lang.org/ There's also Fennel if you want the Lua vm and libraries.

    • fuzztester 3 hours ago
      For what types of work do you Janet in production?
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Thanks! Joe looks good! As for Janet - never tried it myself but I always thought it's doing its own thing instead of trying to be Clojure.
      • TJSomething 1 day ago
        While Janet pulls from a few inspirations, the syntax is pure Clojure. I always figured that it was trying fix up the bumpy parts in Fennel to enable a programming style that was more consistently Clojure-like and functional than could be done in Fennel, since Fennel ultimately has to use Lua's semantics because Fennel compiles to Lua.
        • veqq 10 hours ago
          It's a bit harder as Fennel can produce pure functions, whereas basically everything in Janet's standard library outputs mutable structures etc. Janet style tends towards (elegant) imperative programming.
  • boguscoder 1 day ago
    Micro nit: it says 7ms cold start and then 6ms just few lines lower.. maybe it gets faster as you read README
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Fixed, thanks! It's 6-7ms on my machine. Median seems to be around 6.5ms :)
  • bjconlan 1 day ago
    This is the kind of clojure port that I always was looking for. Mostly because I thought go's core library and channels abstractions hits a simpler/nicer base API which would with the core & async apis (not to mention scratches my big beautiful binary itch)

    Thanks for your work will definitely check it out again once I get over renewed love for cpp (26)

    Edit how did glojure go under my radar also a great project from the looks

    • giancarlostoro 1 day ago
      I have played with the idea of making a “old school PHP” style DSL that takes advantage of the Go runtime and packages under the cover. I say old school PHP because PHP used to be a web focused DSL its no longer the case, I feel like it would make for an interesting easy to use backend language similar to PHP but with the full power of Go behind it. Clojure is an excellent choice.
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Thanks for kind words! Please don't forget to drop me an issue or two when you eventually get to it :)
  • didibus 17 hours ago
    Cool, I think at this point, since there's a few Clojure Go dialect, what I'd like to understand most is which one is fully hosted on Go, has as good interop as JVM Clojure has with Java, where I can both use what I make from Go, and also use Go from Clojure, and even create mixed projects would be nice. And also, truly details the differences, beyond interrop, what is not the same and differs.
    • marcingas 16 hours ago
      I think Gloat/Glojure has the best hosted runtime story because of its AOT to Go src pipeline - you can grab anything Go at compile time. OTOH let-go can roundtrip any Go value including structs, functions and channels but it does not allow pulling arbitrary go libs without wrapping them up first - they'd need to be built into the runtime for this.
  • dharmatech 16 hours ago
    Amazing that it can run in plan9!

    It would be awesome if go was a first class language on 9front. I.e. ships with it.

    I've been messing around with a social network for plan9:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=q6qVnlCjcAI&si=MBCeM0QdA0WsKAe7

    It's all in rc and awk. There are places where go (or clojure!) would have been nice.

    • marcingas 16 hours ago
      Love the demo for 9social! I'm not a user myself but I'm always inspired by the Plan 9 ways :)
      • dharmatech 14 hours ago
        Thanks for checking it out!
    • marcingas 16 hours ago
      I started publishing amd64 and arm (32) binaries for Plan 9 in GH releases. I tested the amd64 one on 9front and everything seems to work. The CLI is not very Plan9-y but I'm happy to make the port more native at some point :)
      • dharmatech 14 hours ago
        Ah, awesome!

        I'll head over to the releases.

  • lsh0 1 day ago
    An alternative is Joker: https://joker-lang.org

    I think it is brilliant and completely underappreciated :)

    • marcingas 1 day ago
      What I appreciate about Joker is how smoothly it wraps Go libs. It seems that they have covered everything that Go has to offer.

      I'm trying to avoid adding too much though, I like that let-go fits in 10MB :)

  • chr15m 1 day ago
  • lenkite 1 day ago
    I wish this had a better language name than just "lets-go". How about "clogo" ?
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Naming is hard but I like let-go, it's a layered pun :)

      (let [...] (go ...))

      It lets you let in Go!

      Clogo is a no-go for me. Maybe you have some other ideas? I'll consider good ones :)

      • dxdm 17 hours ago
        FWIW I like let-go a lot as the name.

        I'm relieved that clogo is not an option for you. It has some strong, malodorous campground toilet connotations to my foreign-language-trained ears. Loogo? Pottygo? Go number 2? Yikes to all of those.

        And now, as bonus content, for something completely different: https://youtu.be/M3-51DhOzHE?

      • lenkite 14 hours ago
        Gojure is simplest. Just a bit close to Glojure which is already taken.

        Goclo, Gophoj,Gorjure ..ok my tongue is paining now verbally trying out combos.

  • faangguyindia 1 day ago
    I am finding i need "Rails" but i like single binary deployment of Go and fast/low resource usage like Go.

    Is it possible for now?

    • marcingas 1 day ago
      I think you could make a framework on top of this. It doesn't yet run unmodified Clojure libs like hiccup but it wouldn't be hard to roll something relatively simple and solid in let-go. IMO
  • phplovesong 1 day ago
    There seems to be a surge in compile to Go projects recently. To me this signals that the runtime / stdlib of Go is one of the best out there (when going the GD'd route), but the surface level (syntax) is too simple/verbose and lacks the expressiveness developers want.

    So far Lisette (http://lisette.run) seems to be the best/most active version of a compile to Go language out there.

    • christophilus 1 day ago
      That does look pretty good. I don’t love the mixing of PascalCase / camelCase and snake_case, though.
      • phplovesong 18 hours ago
        Thats just a pragmatic design decision for Go interop, as Go went nuts with public being UpperCase.

        Theres no camelCase tho? Snake case and PascalCase fir Go modules interrop.

        • networked 18 hours ago
          I'll be happy is Lisette succeeds, but I like Soppo (https://github.com/halcyonnouveau/soppo) for staying closer to Go and not introducing this mismatch.
        • NetMageSCW 13 hours ago
          “let data = io.ReadAll(file)?”

          That’s Pascal case any way. Looks sort of camel case with the “io” being lower case.

  • cutler 1 day ago
    Joker, Janet, Glojure and now Let-go. Am I missing something?
  • slantedview 21 hours ago
    Very cool project!
  • dmitrygr 1 day ago
    You should see how fast libc gets mmaped() into the VM and the first instr runs :)
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Sure, I should clarify: The 7ms here is measured at the point where let-go starts executing user code. It takes 7ms to initialize the compiler, load all stdlib namespaces and compute all vars. So it's not "time to first instruction", it's "time to running your code".
  • brazukadev 1 day ago
    do you know about Glojure?

    https://github.com/glojurelang/glojure

    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Yes, I know about this one. I'm even comparing against it in my benchmarks :)
      • rcarmo 1 day ago
        You need to update the go-joker numbers, I removed the GIL yesterday or so and did some changes to the IR. ;)
        • marcingas 1 day ago
          I think I've pulled the latest today but will double-check and update them again tomorrow. I'm still puzzled why it doesn't run the tak function. Btw. Have you tried running my benches? I'm very curious about your results!
          • rcarmo 3 hours ago
            I got tak fixed. There was an internal logic error, IIRC. A bunch of stuff got done.
        • marcingas 23 hours ago
          Updated. Looks like my VM gets a beating from wazero but that's kind of expected :D
    • ingy 1 day ago
      https://github.com/gloathub/glojure is the actively maintained fork.
  • edem 23 hours ago
    The JVM can boot up in microseconds you just have to tune it a bit.
    • marcingas 23 hours ago
      The JVM itself - yes, but then you need to wait for Clojure itself. Clojure is famously slow because it interns a bunch of stuff and computes var references every time it boots. I never intended for let-go to be a race car but small distro, low memory usage and snappy start are its priorities at the moment.
  • achenet 1 day ago
    This is beautiful, makes me wish I'd made it.

    Excellent work, thank you for sharing it with us ^_^

    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Thank you! If you ever want to contribute PRs and issues are warmly welcomed :)
  • immanuwell 1 day ago
    jvm clojure's startup tax is exactly why it never cracked the serverless/cli niche, and this pure-go implementation is the kind of unhinged side project, good luck
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Thanks! I've been looking into custom runtimes for AWS Lambda and I think it's not going to be hard to have let-go lambdas. Even though the language is not 100% compatible it should be enough for request handlers and data processing. Throughput isn't on par with JITed impls but it's not bad enough to be impractical IMO
  • j3s 1 day ago
    absolutely sick of reading through obviously AI-slopped READMEs. it's your project, take a little pride and tell me why i should like it quickly instead of asking your agent to rattle off a list of features -- it's severely boring & offputting.
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Thanks for feedback. Here's a pre-AI-slopped README https://github.com/nooga/let-go/blob/98c2e2ebf38519bceb4f799...

      You can also refer to the HN post itself - it says why I think it's cool.

      • jimbokun 1 day ago
        This version is infinitely better.
      • j3s 1 day ago
        apologies if i was blunt - readme sloppage is a particular annoyance of mine that is quickly becoming common. i'm not against vibecoding, far from it. but a readme is a part of a project that humans immediately touch - seeing it littered with em-dashes signals carelessness.

        i appreciate you taking my feedback with grace.

        • rcarmo 1 day ago
          I would like to point out, again, that em dashes are very much used by humans that run macOS or iOS — like in this case.
          • isityettime 21 hours ago
            Also Linux, where it's easy to configure a compose key to mnemonically type all the Unicode goodies you can think of.

            Android's software keyboards generally make it easy, too.

        • marcingas 1 day ago
          No worries at all. I understand your point. I'll look into fixing this!
      • stingraycharles 1 day ago
        Why did you feel the need to slopify your README? The original version read much, much better.

        I genuinely don’t understand why people do this.

        • marcingas 1 day ago
          Good question, perhaps I really was just careless. I'll look into fixing the README.
          • stingraycharles 1 day ago
            It’s all good. Your project is awesome (and I say this as someone who has done Clojure fulltime for 5 years and nowadays write mostly Go).
            • uxcolumbo 1 day ago
              What made you stop using Clojure? Lack of Clojure jobs? Or something else?
              • stingraycharles 1 day ago
                Job offer I couldn’t refuse that didn’t have Clojure.

                Now I work for a fully remote team, can work anywhere in the world, at any moment I want, leading the data / cloud team for a distributed timeseries database.

                Can’t complain. :)

                Clojure has had a huge, fundamental impact on my way of approaching software development. I actually came from a Haskell / C++ background, but the way Clojure treats data still has a fundamental impact on how I reason about data, architecture and simplicity.

                I did have some issues with how Clojure is managed and do not always subscribe to Rich’s vision (I think core.spec makes no sense, a heavily macro based global state registry is fundamentally not how I would design this, and malli is infinitely better. same for core.async vs manifold), but that is a minor detail in what was a transformative experience for me.

                I believe I am not alone when I say this.

                I’m still following things from a distance. Considering the current thread, I’m actually very interested in yank, which is Clojure on LLVM, and have been sponsoring that project for a few years. That would be very nice if it could enter stable state, I may take another look again.

                • uxcolumbo 1 day ago
                  Thanks for clarifying.

                  > I did have some issues with how Clojure is managed

                  Yes there was some drama a few years back and then Rich wrote his post 'Opensource is not about you'. It was a good post.

                  Opensource is not easy and you might argue the reason why Clojure is so stable and backwards compatible is because of the way it's managed.

                  Luckily we didn't end up with a scenario where Rich completely stopped. I think there was a recent case of an opensource maintainer (who works in academia) stopping PRs due to an entitled user. Can't remember the project.

                  But equally, is the current form of stewardship fit for purpose for the next 10 years of Clojure, i.e. to increase adoption by businesses? Don't know. Maybe something can be learned from how Linux is managed. I think Linus experienced similar bottleneck issues back then.

                  > I’m actually very interested in yank

                  I think you mean Jank: https://jank-lang.org/ ?

                  I'm quite excited about Clojure for GO projects.

                  EDIT: clarity.

                • jasoneveleth 21 hours ago
                  I've never heard of manifold before and I'm curious what you prefer about it to core.async.

                  I've read through their website and README but I feel like I'm missing what separates it from other async libraries.

                  Can you explain a few examples where it shines compared to core.async?

  • ever_same_4 20 hours ago
    [dead]
    • jeremyjh 19 hours ago
      How do you explain how more than half of that work was done in 2021? Or did you not look at the repo either? Even in 2023 AI could not really vibe code much of anything. Tell me about the AI coding tools available in 2021 though. It was all done with autocomplete?

      created: 7 hours ago

      I’m sure you have some impressive work from that era to share here as well.

  • ever_same_4 23 hours ago
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  • sagar6164 16 hours ago
    [dead]
  • asdasd44123123 22 hours ago
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  • asdasd44123123 22 hours ago
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  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
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  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
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    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Yes, I have used AI to boost Clojure compat and fill out some blanks but the runtime itself is not vibecoded. I wrote it myself between Jan 2021 and July 2023. All commits on GH.
    • jeremyjh 1 day ago
      Did you even look at the repo history? Clearly it blasted off this year that way but that isn't how it started. Probably he got way more into it once he could make faster progress on all the yak shaving required to make it more useful.
      • marcingas 1 day ago
        Yeah, pretty much. I abandoned it in 2023 due to lack of time. At this point it had enough lift for solving AoC problems and writing small scripts. I've recently dusted it off and did the boring parts of the "roadmap" with Claude.
    • adi_kurian 1 day ago
      Is it bad? Did you try it?
    • bpicolo 1 day ago
      As much as we may all hate to admit it, vibecoding is very close to just being the new programming.
    • blanched 1 day ago
      You made an account just to post this low effort “criticism”? What’s the point?
  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
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  • asdasd44123123 22 hours ago
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  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
    I did. And it looks like you did too. Which is why you answered your own question in the second half of your comment, quite amusingly. "Probably" LOL!
    • jeremyjh 1 day ago
      So...you didn't ?

      https://github.com/nooga/let-go/tree/d9dc094822b2983ebf44604...

      In 2023 he had a working Clojure compiler with:

      Macros with syntax quote, Reader conditionals, Destructuring, Multi-arity functions, Atoms, channels & go-blocks a'la core.async, Regular expressions (the Go flavor), Simple json, http and os namespaces, Many functions ported from clojure.core, REPL with syntax-highlighting and completions, Simple nREPL server that seems to work with BetterThanTomorrow/calva,

  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
    The readme clearly has abundant emdashes and emojis everywhere, the code itself is obviously vibed. Not really sure what you're objecting to, to be honest.
    • marcingas 1 day ago
      Yeah, it has em dashes alright. But the emojis you're referring to were committed in January 2023 (0c4925c). But that's besides the point I guess. What is your point?
  • ever_same_4 19 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • jeremyjh 19 hours ago
      Its ok that you have no knowledge or skill of software development. You don't have to keep creating new accounts to troll people with. Why not just go post on X?
      • aosidj12 18 hours ago
        [dead]
      • hope2 14 hours ago
        Its ok that you have no knowledge or skill of software development either. That much is obvious.
  • asdfasd323f 1 day ago
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