It looks like you need to do a lot of leg work to introduce Rust functions into Clojure namespaces. I guess there is no way around it and this is not a criticism of clj.rs. But it doesn't seem to be as seamless as on the JVM.
Has Clojure become the new base for Lisp-like languages? What does it got going for it that people seem to want its specific flavor of lisp? Just asking since I've also seen the Clojure talk about Jank[1] recently and it has gotten me interested.
My first lisp was Clojure. Was skeptical but willing to try. Within two days I was writing a new component for our stack wrapping parts of the Aws sdk to access sqs (years ago).
Since looped around and had semi serious spells of Racket (scheme++; one could say) and Common lisp - purchasing stacks of books along the way.
For me - Clojure was THE language that really taught me functional programming - there really isn’t anything mutable without significant contortions.
It is also just a really good standard library and full of interesting concepts like specs (as opposed to types), transducers and such.
I would say that common lisp still has some interesting, unique features like conditions, which is essentially what exceptions SHOULD have been. But Clojure has a LOT of bang for buck.
Finally, I would swear my most intelligent, high impact code has been written in clojure. There is something to be said for the decomposition of problems with higher-order functions and immutable data structures and a live REPL.
Coming from Ruby, wanting to learn a Lisp, there are so many things in Clojure that make the language much easier for me to understand, compare to other Lisps. Simple things like first/rest vs car/cdr make it much more ergonomic and easy to grok, IMHO.
Yeah I alluded to this in my comment, but I think the dict literals just make for a much easier on ramp for someone familiar with Python or JS (or JSON, which is increasingly unavoidable for even C++ devs like me).
The ecosystem of Java, .NET and the Web, and contrary to other guest programming language communities, they embrace their host platform instead of downplaying it, and talking about replacing it.
As such you get all the nice stuff that has made Lisp a great language, plus access to modern libraries.
Note that since Common Lisp there has not been another standard, and in what concerns Scheme, Dr Raket is more relevant. Also R7rs Large has been hanging on for years now.
Same, I needed a Lisp that was typed for the AI era where Clojure's dynamism didn't fit the bill. Carp was a perfect fit, and I managed to create a few projects with the help of Deepseek
It's immutable, has bracket syntax for data structures, and most of its standard library has very sensible naming and nil-sentinel conventions. The result is that it's astonishingly easy to read and write. The data structure sharing under the hood also keeps it performant. Finding and obtaining packages with its build systems is also easy.
Scheme gets close but has some odd naming conventions and completely wild conventions for packages (SFRI, etc). CL's entire library is full of incredibly odd names first established at the very advent of computing. Using it can be...dense. And inconsistent, since it's not purely functional and has no dedicated data structure syntax.
the data structure literals are really pleasant to work with, and oh how I miss get-in and update-in in every other language (with all the ecosystem of functions that follow that pattern and are built to work with it)
Also, living on a host language has always been part of its ethos. So if you want to be Lisp on C++ or Lisp on Rust, you’re going to be more ideologically aligned with the Clojure crowd than the Common Lisp crowd who pinch their nose and say ALGOL when you mention either.
Yeah but what's even sadder is projects like this sometimes end up getting open source funding from the community. Which just means money getting used to pay for claude subscription. Paying claude to give you stolen content to then
deprive other non LLM projects from funding. Basically stealing from the community twice.
My guess is, within the next 3-5 years, most ALGOL descendant languages will become obsolete, and S-exp based Lisp dialects will take over. Objectively superior.
Behold a native kernel, no inline asm or linker scripts, of any kind. The full compiler pipeline is controllable through the compiler (you can arbitrarily target, devise, or enable/disable various optimization passes, for instance you can enable LICM at will). Also has a hard 1:1 correspondence to C/C++/Rust/adding more languages soon.
This does look interesting, although I did get a chuckle from the "no inline assembler" claim and then seeing x86 intrinsics in the source for seeing some special registers like the segment registers, GDTP, setting IO ports, and some such. Those are of course necessary, but at least in terms of portability, they're not that far off from inline assembler.
From a quick glance over your example, it looks like a hodgepodge of Scheme, Clojure, and Common Lisp with some Rust-y constructs in it. If you don't mind elaborating, why not take some existing "embedded" dialect like Pre-Scheme and compile that? Because currently this looks a lot more like Rust-with-parenthesis rather than a Lisp. Of course if that's the goal then that's fine, but I'd like to hear some elaboration on that.
>My guess is, within the next 3-5 years, most ALGOL descendant languages will become obsolete, and S-exp based Lisp dialects will take over.
In AI-driven world, programming languages have become more of a hobby, especially in regards to syntax/semantics. Importance is now mostly solely on tooling quality features and compiler-enforced guarantees. Rust has always been popular "written in" target, even more now, and probably the last language shift for a long time, offering compiler-time memory safety, excellent compile messages, packaging/deployment ergonomics, etc.
My guess is, your language (as is the submitted one) compiler/tooling is written in Rust and made by/in-assistance-with AI, probably Claude.
Curious why you’re so bullish on S-Expressions now of all times.
It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
The other half of the Lisp sales pitch (image based development, constantly inspect state, hot swap code, REPL, etc) seems like what has retained currency in the LLM age.
If you write a compiler for a low level Algol-family language in a LISP, then LISP's homoiconic nature makes certain patterns possible which do not come so easy in other languages.
The compiler becomes a library in the host language. As you can use the syntax of the host language for the compiled language, you can create host-side defining forms like (define-compiled-function [NAME PARAMS & BODY]) which parse the body of the compiled function into an AST and bind the resulting data structure into a namespaced variable of the host language. This way you can rely on the host's namespacing mechanisms and probably reuse even its packaging and code distribution model for your low level language.
Another interesting feature which just "falls out" is compiler macros: you can use ordinary functions of the host language as macros (code transformers) in the compiled language.
Then you can write a lowering function which takes one of these AST vars, walks its call graph, resolves references and lowers the whole thing into your target language, be it Python, Go, LLVM IR, assembly, whatever.
If you pass a context to your lowering function which binds settings dynamically like target arch, word size, C calling convention, etc. then the code generators can emit the corresponding lowerings and you get portability using the dispatch/polymorphism facilities of the host language.
This way you can push most of the complexity of the language to the LISP side. Basically you get a programmable compiler for your low level language.
I expect to see a lot more examples of this pattern in the coming years.
> It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
That seems true in a world where we completely stop looking at code. Right now my reality is giant verbose PRs written by agents in Java, and it sucks to review.
Yeah, I mean this is somewhat compelling, although the old arguments people brought out (macros are obfuscatory) seem to grow more teeth if agents are writing the macros.
So I guess the idea is tastemaker humans spend all their time coming up with sweet macros and telling agents to refactor the ever shrinking code base.
But even still I think the main argument for S-Expressions (it’s easiest for humans to create DSLs by working on serialized AST) has become weaker. If DSLs are the best way to make a code base readable, you can now have your agent create one with whatever syntax you like!
> If DSLs are the best way to make a code base readable, you can now have your agent create one with whatever syntax you like!
I think these things are going to be true:
- For a specific well-defined coding task, an LLM coding agent will be able to execute it quicker than humans, regardless of how it does it.
- Codebases which are well organised will be easier for an LLM to manipulate than codebases which are obscure and surprising.
I mean.. I think it's plausible that something like "lisp makes DSLs easy, DSLs are a great way to arrange code" is especially true with LLMs; but I'd also think you'd need to know when to use (& when to not use) DSLs to get effective results from this.
Whereas, say, you could have the LLM come up with a DSL in a way which is high friction for the LLM to do it ... but, you'd get the result a bit slower, & maybe worse.
Thinking along these lines myself lately. Even better than dsls is dsls directly descended from recognizable formalisms, which achieves compression for humans and agents at the same time, and is even more effective than any other kind of dsl’s at restricting the bad kind of ai “creativity”.
I’ve been experimenting with stuff like “this project is a Kahn process network, every change is strict conformer to that model, add features only by adding nodes”. As a bonus if you’re strict then porting the specific implementation to a new language should be easy.
To me stuff like this feels like the future of programming.. details don’t matter but design language does. not leet code of fancy data structures from scratch but at least a basic familiarity with LOTS of them, a working knowledge of vast zoos of expressive patterns and automata, etc.
> It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
Seems more important than ever? Every model degrades the more context you use, programs that can be described more succinctly will be better made, at least when using LLMs to create these, as it's much easier to fit more "meat" per token.
I'm on the same "S-Expressions taking over is inevitable" but to be fair, I've been on this train for the last decade so maybe I'm slightly biased.
That’s a plausible story, but doesn’t seem to bear out in terms of models being amazing at Lisp. Like, Sonnet 4.5 was writing me emacs Lisp with unbalanced parentheses.
I don’t really have faith that I could write macros of such incredible brilliance that it would outweigh the models’ facility with Python.
Some vibe slopped lisp where the maintainer doesn't have the technical skills to achieve sustained excellence without consulting an LLM every other minute and almost certainly doesn't have the social juice to evangelize Lisp? That's taking over? Over what?
One of the killer features of Clojure is it's seamless interop with the host platform. On the JVM you do something like
(Integer/parseInt my-variable); this calls Integer.parseInt(my_variable) in Java-land
I tried to find examples for how to call Rust code and the best I could find is:
https://github.com/csm/clojurust/blob/b847a29b46e2b6b3fbe624...
It looks like you need to do a lot of leg work to introduce Rust functions into Clojure namespaces. I guess there is no way around it and this is not a criticism of clj.rs. But it doesn't seem to be as seamless as on the JVM.
Has Clojure become the new base for Lisp-like languages? What does it got going for it that people seem to want its specific flavor of lisp? Just asking since I've also seen the Clojure talk about Jank[1] recently and it has gotten me interested.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHgApFhevrQ
My first lisp was Clojure. Was skeptical but willing to try. Within two days I was writing a new component for our stack wrapping parts of the Aws sdk to access sqs (years ago).
Since looped around and had semi serious spells of Racket (scheme++; one could say) and Common lisp - purchasing stacks of books along the way.
For me - Clojure was THE language that really taught me functional programming - there really isn’t anything mutable without significant contortions.
It is also just a really good standard library and full of interesting concepts like specs (as opposed to types), transducers and such.
I would say that common lisp still has some interesting, unique features like conditions, which is essentially what exceptions SHOULD have been. But Clojure has a LOT of bang for buck.
Finally, I would swear my most intelligent, high impact code has been written in clojure. There is something to be said for the decomposition of problems with higher-order functions and immutable data structures and a live REPL.
Coming from Ruby, wanting to learn a Lisp, there are so many things in Clojure that make the language much easier for me to understand, compare to other Lisps. Simple things like first/rest vs car/cdr make it much more ergonomic and easy to grok, IMHO.
Yeah I alluded to this in my comment, but I think the dict literals just make for a much easier on ramp for someone familiar with Python or JS (or JSON, which is increasingly unavoidable for even C++ devs like me).
The ecosystem of Java, .NET and the Web, and contrary to other guest programming language communities, they embrace their host platform instead of downplaying it, and talking about replacing it.
As such you get all the nice stuff that has made Lisp a great language, plus access to modern libraries.
Note that since Common Lisp there has not been another standard, and in what concerns Scheme, Dr Raket is more relevant. Also R7rs Large has been hanging on for years now.
All Clojures are Lisps, but not all Lisps are Clojures. :)
Nothing will ever be a base for lisps because theyre too malleable and the temptation ro create your own is too high
Anyway my recent favorite is Carp:
https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
Serious projects in it? Zero
Same, I needed a Lisp that was typed for the AI era where Clojure's dynamism didn't fit the bill. Carp was a perfect fit, and I managed to create a few projects with the help of Deepseek
It's immutable, has bracket syntax for data structures, and most of its standard library has very sensible naming and nil-sentinel conventions. The result is that it's astonishingly easy to read and write. The data structure sharing under the hood also keeps it performant. Finding and obtaining packages with its build systems is also easy.
Scheme gets close but has some odd naming conventions and completely wild conventions for packages (SFRI, etc). CL's entire library is full of incredibly odd names first established at the very advent of computing. Using it can be...dense. And inconsistent, since it's not purely functional and has no dedicated data structure syntax.
the data structure literals are really pleasant to work with, and oh how I miss get-in and update-in in every other language (with all the ecosystem of functions that follow that pattern and are built to work with it)
Hash table literals.
Also, living on a host language has always been part of its ethos. So if you want to be Lisp on C++ or Lisp on Rust, you’re going to be more ideologically aligned with the Clojure crowd than the Common Lisp crowd who pinch their nose and say ALGOL when you mention either.
SBCL is written in C and have FFI baked in
http://www.lichteblau.com/sbcl/doc/manual/sbcl/Foreign-Funct...
Maybe it’s too much work to write a full lisp vm in another language when it’s easier to write a loader.
> SBCL is written in C
That's not quite right.
Nowadays, historically Lisps have had the primitive forms written in Assembly and everything else bootstrap.
Why not name it “Cloju.rs” instead? :-)
came here to write exactly that xD
The only thing I know about Clojure is Walmart used it to rewrite their entire inventory system.
Didn't know this. What they used before and why the decision? An article/presentation by the devs that worked on this will be interesting.
Nice, but what are the non goals?
Except maybe the compilation to native binary, this is closer to clojurescript than clojure I suppose ?
How about a comparison with Jank?
Love to see more Clojure dialects taking fruit. Jank is very promising for C++ and now we have the Rust complement
Claude sure is busy these days.
Many projects that'ld have found cool in the past, now have me hardly care about them. If anything, see them as token pit.
Yeah but what's even sadder is projects like this sometimes end up getting open source funding from the community. Which just means money getting used to pay for claude subscription. Paying claude to give you stolen content to then deprive other non LLM projects from funding. Basically stealing from the community twice.
Which is why when I see it on the contributions list, I close the browser tab right away.
It is like someone talking about culinary recipes, while leaving the frozen food boxes visible to the audience.
'man' of the year
Cool.
I'm already a big fan of the scheme-rs crate.
I use it any time I need a dynamic scripting language.
It allows for more flexible hot-reloading of parts of a program.
I don't personally have any Clojure interop holes that need filling.
But I can imagine a future where one moves partially away from the JVM if e.g. faster starts or leaner container images are desired.
I love scheme and rust but somehow did not know about scheme-rs! Looks like such a good project, thanks for the recommendation!
Any advantages over steel?
https://github.com/mattwparas/steel
It's vibecoded which makes it unlikely it has been actually tested well.
I'm working on something similar.
My guess is, within the next 3-5 years, most ALGOL descendant languages will become obsolete, and S-exp based Lisp dialects will take over. Objectively superior.
Behold a native kernel, no inline asm or linker scripts, of any kind. The full compiler pipeline is controllable through the compiler (you can arbitrarily target, devise, or enable/disable various optimization passes, for instance you can enable LICM at will). Also has a hard 1:1 correspondence to C/C++/Rust/adding more languages soon.
This does look interesting, although I did get a chuckle from the "no inline assembler" claim and then seeing x86 intrinsics in the source for seeing some special registers like the segment registers, GDTP, setting IO ports, and some such. Those are of course necessary, but at least in terms of portability, they're not that far off from inline assembler.
From a quick glance over your example, it looks like a hodgepodge of Scheme, Clojure, and Common Lisp with some Rust-y constructs in it. If you don't mind elaborating, why not take some existing "embedded" dialect like Pre-Scheme and compile that? Because currently this looks a lot more like Rust-with-parenthesis rather than a Lisp. Of course if that's the goal then that's fine, but I'd like to hear some elaboration on that.
>My guess is, within the next 3-5 years, most ALGOL descendant languages will become obsolete, and S-exp based Lisp dialects will take over.
In AI-driven world, programming languages have become more of a hobby, especially in regards to syntax/semantics. Importance is now mostly solely on tooling quality features and compiler-enforced guarantees. Rust has always been popular "written in" target, even more now, and probably the last language shift for a long time, offering compiler-time memory safety, excellent compile messages, packaging/deployment ergonomics, etc.
My guess is, your language (as is the submitted one) compiler/tooling is written in Rust and made by/in-assistance-with AI, probably Claude.
Curious why you’re so bullish on S-Expressions now of all times.
It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
The other half of the Lisp sales pitch (image based development, constantly inspect state, hot swap code, REPL, etc) seems like what has retained currency in the LLM age.
If you write a compiler for a low level Algol-family language in a LISP, then LISP's homoiconic nature makes certain patterns possible which do not come so easy in other languages.
The compiler becomes a library in the host language. As you can use the syntax of the host language for the compiled language, you can create host-side defining forms like (define-compiled-function [NAME PARAMS & BODY]) which parse the body of the compiled function into an AST and bind the resulting data structure into a namespaced variable of the host language. This way you can rely on the host's namespacing mechanisms and probably reuse even its packaging and code distribution model for your low level language.
Another interesting feature which just "falls out" is compiler macros: you can use ordinary functions of the host language as macros (code transformers) in the compiled language.
Then you can write a lowering function which takes one of these AST vars, walks its call graph, resolves references and lowers the whole thing into your target language, be it Python, Go, LLVM IR, assembly, whatever.
If you pass a context to your lowering function which binds settings dynamically like target arch, word size, C calling convention, etc. then the code generators can emit the corresponding lowerings and you get portability using the dispatch/polymorphism facilities of the host language.
This way you can push most of the complexity of the language to the LISP side. Basically you get a programmable compiler for your low level language.
I expect to see a lot more examples of this pattern in the coming years.
> It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
That seems true in a world where we completely stop looking at code. Right now my reality is giant verbose PRs written by agents in Java, and it sucks to review.
Yeah, I mean this is somewhat compelling, although the old arguments people brought out (macros are obfuscatory) seem to grow more teeth if agents are writing the macros.
So I guess the idea is tastemaker humans spend all their time coming up with sweet macros and telling agents to refactor the ever shrinking code base.
But even still I think the main argument for S-Expressions (it’s easiest for humans to create DSLs by working on serialized AST) has become weaker. If DSLs are the best way to make a code base readable, you can now have your agent create one with whatever syntax you like!
> If DSLs are the best way to make a code base readable, you can now have your agent create one with whatever syntax you like!
I think these things are going to be true:
- For a specific well-defined coding task, an LLM coding agent will be able to execute it quicker than humans, regardless of how it does it.
- Codebases which are well organised will be easier for an LLM to manipulate than codebases which are obscure and surprising.
I mean.. I think it's plausible that something like "lisp makes DSLs easy, DSLs are a great way to arrange code" is especially true with LLMs; but I'd also think you'd need to know when to use (& when to not use) DSLs to get effective results from this.
Whereas, say, you could have the LLM come up with a DSL in a way which is high friction for the LLM to do it ... but, you'd get the result a bit slower, & maybe worse.
Thinking along these lines myself lately. Even better than dsls is dsls directly descended from recognizable formalisms, which achieves compression for humans and agents at the same time, and is even more effective than any other kind of dsl’s at restricting the bad kind of ai “creativity”.
I’ve been experimenting with stuff like “this project is a Kahn process network, every change is strict conformer to that model, add features only by adding nodes”. As a bonus if you’re strict then porting the specific implementation to a new language should be easy.
To me stuff like this feels like the future of programming.. details don’t matter but design language does. not leet code of fancy data structures from scratch but at least a basic familiarity with LOTS of them, a working knowledge of vast zoos of expressive patterns and automata, etc.
> It seems like the idea of the macro, and more generally of expressing code succinctly, is the closest to obsolete in my memory?
Seems more important than ever? Every model degrades the more context you use, programs that can be described more succinctly will be better made, at least when using LLMs to create these, as it's much easier to fit more "meat" per token.
I'm on the same "S-Expressions taking over is inevitable" but to be fair, I've been on this train for the last decade so maybe I'm slightly biased.
That’s a plausible story, but doesn’t seem to bear out in terms of models being amazing at Lisp. Like, Sonnet 4.5 was writing me emacs Lisp with unbalanced parentheses.
I don’t really have faith that I could write macros of such incredible brilliance that it would outweigh the models’ facility with Python.
I expect this to take over within the next couple of years. Great job!
Take over what, exactly? The java ecosystem version? The javascript ecosystem version ? The c++, clojure-like dialect ?
Some vibe slopped lisp where the maintainer doesn't have the technical skills to achieve sustained excellence without consulting an LLM every other minute and almost certainly doesn't have the social juice to evangelize Lisp? That's taking over? Over what?