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Clojure for the Erlang VM

by lsh on 1/6/20, 12:42 AM with 49 comments

  • by tombert on 1/6/20, 2:56 AM

    Clojerl is really cool, and you should play with it; it's actually surprising how well the semantics transfer over to the Erlang VM.

    If anyone wants something that feels a bit more vanilla-erlang-ish, one should also check out Lisp Flavoured Erlang. It is almost a direct one-to-one translation of Erlang into Lisp-land (actually made by one of Erlang's co-creators), but also provides Common-Lisp-Style macros, and a much more consistent, cleaner syntax than vanilla Erlang.

  • by reilly3000 on 1/6/20, 3:55 AM

    With the ability to reach Java, JavaScript, .Net, and Erlang runtimes, plus interop with many other languages via GraalVM, Clojure has incredible reach across runtimes, perhaps more than any other modern programming language, certainly among Lisps. That said, its pretty gnarly to try to navigate all of the implementation differences among platforms. I wonder if there is a subset of Clojure that is 'safe' to run on any of its supported environments.

    This list is pretty long: https://clojerl.github.io/differences-with-clojure/

    For now, the JVM is the only way to get the full Clojure experience.

  • by macintux on 1/6/20, 3:04 AM

    There are at least 19 alternative languages for the BEAM[1]. If anyone knows of any I’ve missed, let me know.

    [1]: https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#alternative-languag...

  • by whalesalad on 1/6/20, 3:15 AM

    The site does a great job explaining what Clojure features exist in this port ... but what about Erlang features? There doesn't appear to be a first-class adoption of things like supervisors and actors like you see in Elixir, for example. Or at least the docs don't do a great job explaining it?

  • by andreareina on 1/6/20, 2:43 AM

    Page is a frameset around https://clojerl.github.io, which breaks the mobile experience (fixed width, content too small). Going directly to the github.io copy scales the content correctly and provides https.

  • by abjKT26nO8 on 1/6/20, 9:34 AM

        <frameset rows='100%, *' frameborder=no framespacing=0 border=0>
        <frame src="https://clojerl.github.io/" name=mainwindow frameborder=no framespacing=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0></frame>
    </frameset>
    What...? Why...? I just can't...

  • by Vizarddesky on 1/6/20, 7:47 AM

    I'm curious to see a detailed list of language constructs and features that are and aren't supported.

  • by kopos on 1/6/20, 10:51 AM

    Why Clojerl when LFE maps directly to the best of what BEAM offers - supervisor trees and pattern matching?

  • by ishankhare07 on 1/6/20, 8:09 AM

    I don't see how this brings anything new to the ecosystem. Clojure is a LISP and we already have lfe (http://lfe.io/) - LISP floured Erlang for quiet a while now, hence it will definitely be more mature than a new implementation altogether. Moreover I feel, seeing the the currently more effort should be made in maturing the classic clojure implementation and the tooling around it itself, rather than diverting the community into fancy new (not so useful) ports of the same syntax for other runtimes. Seriously, just go improve clojure itself. And if you want to be able to write lisp for BEAM, just use lfe.

  • by zelly on 1/6/20, 3:48 AM

    Now I want to see a port to the Low Level Virtual Machine

  • by crimsonalucard on 1/6/20, 5:55 AM

    Does anyone know if there are any languages with ADTs running on top of the erlang vm?