• Heart of Clojure: In September, the author flew to Belgium to speak at Heart of Clojure. Part of the talk was an announcement that starting in January 2025, they will quit their job at EA to focus on jank full-time. They don't have funding yet but aim to get jank out there and create value.
• Mentoring: Next year, the author joined the SciCloj mentorship program as a mentor and has two official mentees. There were several interested people but only two were selected for the time being.
• JIT compilation speeds: The author has been looking into optimizing jank's startup time. Currently, jank generates C++ from its AST, but C++ is slow to compile. By using a pre-compiled header and pre-compiling modules like clojure.core, startup time improved from 12 seconds to 0.3 seconds. However, AOT compiling clojure.core takes 2 minutes. The author also explored generating LLVM IR and has almost completed the LLVM IR codegen, except for closures and try expressions.
• How this affects interop: Currently, jank has two forms of native interop. When generating C++, native/raw gets code-generated directly. But when generating IR, native/raw needs to be removed. Instead, jank can rely on actual native source files to register types/functions. This means jank still needs JIT compiling C++ for some cases.
• jank as THE native Clojure dialect: By using the C ABI as the runtime library, jank can be used with other languages like Ruby, Lua, Rust, and Clojure JVM. It can also JIT compile any LLVM IR, opening the door for more Rust within the jank compiler.
• Community update: Saket has been improving jank's runtime character objects and added scientific notation and to_code_string. Jianling merged support for all ASCII escape sequences and is working on more syntax enhancements. Haruki is helping with the Nix build system. LLVM 19 support is being backported, which will simplify the developer experience.
• Summary: More people are working on jank, and the author will share final startup time comparisons and other updates in the next update.
• Would you like to join in: Join the community on Slack, participate in design discussions on GitHub, consider becoming a sponsor, or hire the author full-time to work on jank.