Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   nasser (nasser@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 09-Jun-2023 05:27:48 JST nasser

   rewriting it in F# mind you. i think the codebase i have in clojure is kind of a dead end. its architecture is... not great to begin with (i was young when i started it) and its further gunked up by a pile of optimizations that turn out to not matter for the primary current use case. its having issues with a particular target that are hard to even diagnose at this point, let alone resolve...

   • Embed this notice
     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Friday, 09-Jun-2023 05:27:47 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @nasser was the original goal to use the JVM clojure as a bootstrapping technique to get it self-hosted later down the line, or did you just use clojure for funsies?

   • Embed this notice
     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Friday, 09-Jun-2023 05:28:58 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @nasser F# is cool and all (because OCaml is cool) but I can't bring myself to cast a vote against self-hosting

   • Embed this notice
     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Friday, 09-Jun-2023 06:10:29 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @nasser yeah... we've had basically zero downsides in Fennel but obviously the scope is so much more constrained that it's a very different story

     I guess it's not really possible to bootstrap from a "known good" copy saved off somewhere, which may be "regular clojure" and may be a previous version of your own compiler?

     I got the impression that a bunch of the features they added in 1.3 were specifically designed to support self-hosting, (deftype and friends) but then cljs happened and they kind of lost interest in self-hosting altogether somehow

   • Embed this notice
     nasser (nasser@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 09-Jun-2023 06:10:30 JST nasser

     in reply to

     • tech? no! man, see...

     @technomancy yeah... I agree in principle, but in practice it's been nothing but downsides. my takeaway is that a language has to be designed carefully from scratch for self-hosting and clojure just... isn't. there's all kinds of annoying circularities to resolve just to get the damn thing to boot at all, not even getting into the carnage that spec left in it's wake... it also puts you in a situation where when anything breaks *everything* breaks ☠️