Hi everyone! It's been a very busy couple of months as I've been developing jank's LLVM IR generation, improving jank's semantic analysis, and furthering jank's module loading system. Thank you to all of my Github sponsors and to Clojurists Together, who help me pay the bills. As of January 2025, I'll be working on jank full-time and every new sponsor means that much more. Without further ado, let's dive into the details of the past couple of months.

Hi everyone! It's been a few months since the last update and I'm excited to outline what's been going on and what's upcoming for jank, the native Clojure dialect. Many thanks to Clojurists Together and my Github sponsors for the support. Let's get into it!

Welcome back to another jank development update! For the past month, I've been pushing jank closer to production readiness primarily by working on multimethods and by debugging issues with Clang 19 (currently unreleased). Much love to Clojurists Together and all of my Github sponsors for their support this quarter.

Hey folks! I've been building on last month's addition of lazy sequences, loop*, destructuring, and more. This month, I've worked on rounding out lazy sequences, adding more mutability, better meta support, and some big project updates. Much love to Clojurists Together, who are funding my work this quarter.

This quarter, I'm being funded by Clojurists Together to build out jank's lazy sequences, special loop* form, destructuring, and support for the for and doseq macros. Going into this quarter, I had only a rough idea of how Clojure's lazy sequences were implemented. Now, a month in, I'm ready to report some impressive progress!

Oh, hey folks. I was just wrapping up this macro I was writing. One moment.

For the past couple of months, I have been focused on tackling dynamic var bindings and meta hints, which grew into much, much more. Along the way, I've learned some neat things and have positioned jank to be ready for a lot more outside contributions. Grab a seat and I'll explain it all! Much love to Clojurists Together, who have sponsored some of my work this quarter.

One thing I've been meaning to do is build a custom string class for jank. I had some time, during the holidays, between wrapping up this quarter's work and starting on next quarter's, so I decided to see if I could beat both std::string and folly::fbstring, in terms of performance. After all, if we're gonna make a string class, it'll need to be fast. :)

I've been quiet for the past couple of months, finishing up this work on jank's module loading, class path handling, aliasing, and var referring. Along the way, I ran into some very interesting bugs and we're in for a treat of technical detail in this holiday edition of jank development updates! A warm shout out to my Github sponsors and Clojurists Together for sponsoring this work.

For the past month and a half, I've been building out jank's support for clojure.core/require, including everything from class path handling to compiling jank files to intermediate code written to the filesystem. This is a half-way report for the quarter. As a warm note, my work on jank this quarter is being sponsored by Clojurists Together.

As summer draws to a close, in the Pacific Northwest, so too does my term of sponsored work focused on a faster object model for jank. Thanks so much to Clojurists Together for funding jank's development. The past quarter has been quite successful and I'm excited to share the results.

This quarter, my work on jank is being sponsored by Clojurists Together. The terms of the work are to research a new object model for jank, with the goal of making jank code faster across the board. This is a half-way report and I'm excited to share my results!

After the last post, which focused on optimizing jank's sequences, I wanted to get jank running a ray tracer I had previously written in Clojure. In this post, I document what was required to start ray tracing in jank and, more importantly, how I chased down the run time in a fierce battle with Clojure's performance.

In this episode of jank's development updates, we follow an exciting few weekends as I was digging deep into Clojure's sequence implementation, building jank's equivalent, and then benchmarking and profiling in a dizzying race to the bottom.

I was previously giving updates only in the #jank Slack channel, but some of these are getting large enough to warrant more prose. Thus, happily, I can announce that jank has a new blog and I have a lot of new progress to report! Let's get into the details.