Hi Jeaye, love what you and the other contributors are doing with jank. The further proliferation of clojure dialects can't happen quickly enough imo.
Do you have any "killer app" style use cases in mind for jank? Babashka is great in CLI/FaaS settings, native Clojure is great for "situated" programs that can afford a JVM startup and some memory overhead
Which settings are you particularly excited to use jank in?
I may be biased, having built a career in game dev, but I would love to see people developing games using a REPL. Many games these days use Lua or similar for scripting logic, since it doesn't need to be written in C++, it can change at runtime, and it's reasonably fast. jank is all of those things, too! I think, if we can get jank into Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, etc so that people can use their existing tool set, write functional code, and use interactive programming, it could be a game changer for game dev.
Another great use case, I think, is desktop GUI dev. Outside of Humble UI, which is still very new, Clojure's GUI story has been quite bad. The native world has all sorts of GUI options though and jank will be introducing them to Clojurists.
I think jank will be a good option for anyone who wants to use certain native libraries along with their Clojure programming. Jack Rusher, for instance, has said there are native graphics libs he'd love to use and jank is a promising way to do that.
Finally, I aim to provide a cargo-like experience (if you're familiar with Rust) for jank. This should make building native apps easy. As I alluded to in my post, building C and C++ apps is a pretty terrible experience. If jank can make that twice as easy, for example, it could be that native devs end up preferring it as their project baseline. Since jank allows for arbitrary C++ to be included alongside the jank sources, and required as though it's a Clojure namespace, it actually ends up being a pretty sane way to write programs which involve a lot of C++.
With all of that said, I don't imagine I'll be working on anything other thank jank for quite some time. I think of these mainly as things I'm excited to see others do. :)
Didn't get to meet you at HoC but I wanted to say thank you for working on jank. It's going to bring Clojure into so many new places typically reserved for compile-to-binary languages. Awesome work!
Do you have any "killer app" style use cases in mind for jank? Babashka is great in CLI/FaaS settings, native Clojure is great for "situated" programs that can afford a JVM startup and some memory overhead
Which settings are you particularly excited to use jank in?
reply