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takeoutweight
clojure-scheme
Clojure2012–2023
takeoutweight / clojure-scheme

clojure-scheme

Clojure to Scheme to C to the bare metal.

Languages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
14Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
566GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Clojure to Scheme to C to the bare metal.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-03-12 17:14:12 UTC to 2023-01-10 15:03:38 UTC.

012342012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

15 sources
grayrest·Oct 22, 2015
Clojurescript is the more "all the way down" of the two. It managed to self-host a few months ago so in theory you could write a backend and cross compile to your computing platform of choice. I know of a number of alternative targets but they all predate the self-hosting and none are actively maintained: [1] https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme [2] https://github.com/raph-amiard/clojurescript-lua I think it'd be a fun project to get cljs-lua working and build a system for developing OpenResty apps but it's so low on my priority list I don't anticipate ever making it happen.
In Clojure all the way down
mullr·May 5, 2013
This is neat. What worries me about this and similar efforts (like https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme) is that clojure's standard library design assumes that the underlying runtime will be do some kind of polymorphic method inlining. For example: the sequence library is all defined in terms of ISeq, which basically requires a "first" and "rest" to be defined for the data structure in question. These are polymorphic: there are different implementations of these for different data structures (list, vector, map, etc). So a dispatch step is required to choose the right one. In clojure-jvm, this is implemented using a java interface; this means the jvm will inline calls to said methods when they're being used in a tight loop. And if you use the standard library, calls to 'first' and 'rest' are going to be inside nearly all of your
Read the rest
inner loops. Compare this to a normal lisp or scheme: 'first' and 'rest' (or 'car' and 'cdr', whatever) are monomorphic. They only work on the linked-list data structure. So compiling these directly down to C functions makes perfect sense and incurs no performance penalty. So in summary: clojure assumes theres a really smart JIT which is helping things along. This means it's not as suitable for alternate compilation targets as you might want it to be. I wonder if there's something clever you could do here. Vtables could be reordered based on expected usage, certainly. Clojure can already do some measure of type inference, so this could be used for AOT inlining when it's available. Even if it's not, perhaps several versions of a call could be speculatively generated based on what the compiler does know already. The normal polymorphic inline caching technique could perhaps be abused to apply here. But it's hard to see how any of this can work in absence of a profile or heavy hinting. (not a compiler writer, just interested in the problem)
In ClojureC, a compiler for Clojure that targets C as a backend

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