from Hacker News

Pixie: A sweet Clojure-ish language

by coding4all on 3/9/15, 2:32 AM with 105 comments

  • by 616c on 3/9/15, 1:45 PM

    I like the side-note.

    > As a side note, expressing configurations in Clojure S-expressions makes a ton of sense. Clojure S-expressions provide a superset of JSON and Clojure's eval allows you to define a function to compute certain values. It's an escape hatch so that you're configuration files don't need to become accidentally Turing complete. The Turing complete nature of your configuration files is well defined as Clojure.

    I had posted a while back wondering why more formats do not just derive from sexp or SXML (yes, say that out loud in the office). As I think some Lispers (I am even below beginner) cannot help but notice that if sexpr are coincidentally (I am sure it can be done without, but still, I am not sure if McCarthy and company just started with sexp or choose it specifically and held their ground beyond it was their choice) core to the lisp's homoiconic power-features, why more people do not just want sexp as the core data definiton, keep the data and program as close as possible, and just macro the data back, tossing back and forth between code and data as the division is limited.

    Anyway, I like that far more intelligent people than me not only like this idea, but are encouraging it and pushing it forward.

    (Yes, flame away. I know some people love Lisp and hate, I just thought it is an interesting premise; I am ready for you to throw shoes at me, HN.)

  • by threeseed on 3/9/15, 9:04 AM

    This seems like bit of a short sighted move not that I disagree with it.

    Project Jigsaw which will be a big part of Java 9 aims to make the JVM more modular which will reduce the memory footprint substantially. Personally I would like to see a version of Clojure that targets this JVM specifically and abandons backwards compatibility.

    Leaving the JVM means you abandon the decade of libraries many of which you simply can't get on any other platform (in particular for the enterprise). Given that Clojure has been gaining a lot of ground in these large companies it seems like a missed opportunity.

  • by pjmlp on 3/9/15, 10:50 AM

    > And the JVM has the slowest startup time of any runtime I've ever encountered.

    Blame Clojure not the JVM.

    https://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-star...

    Besides if 0.04s is still too slow, there are quite a few (commercial) AOT compilers to native code available.

    However, Pixie does look quite cool.

    What I am missing in Clojure is the ability to take advantage of type metadata to compile it AOT to Android Dalvik/ART friendly bytecode.

    Apparently not even 1.7.0 will fix the performance issues.

  • by weavie on 3/9/15, 8:33 AM

    > There are some things that I would like to see from/in Pixie...

    > Some form of package distribution support... could this be piggy-backed on Clojars?

    There is Dust :

    https://github.com/pixie-lang/dust

    which pulls packages from Github.

  • by kra34 on 3/9/15, 4:14 PM

    I'm already replacing my project's ancient Go and Rust based services with Pixie powered end points!

  • by Gonzih on 3/9/15, 12:22 PM

    Language and implementation both look very promising! I was looking for small footprint and fast startup modern lisp for a long time for my embed hobby projects. And finally it's here! I'm really excited about this language and where it stands now compared to when I first discovered it.

  • by andrewchambers on 3/9/15, 9:29 AM

    I want to see a clojure clone embedded as a Go scripting language. The immutability means that the interpreter would be mostly threadsafe, and thus would support goroutines well.

  • by agumonkey on 3/9/15, 8:34 AM

    Direct link to pixie's github https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

  • by bmillare on 3/9/15, 1:38 PM

    Can anyone verify if Pixie has concurrent multithreading or is it limited to greenthreads as described in the article? Based on the fact that atoms are implemented and they would not be necessary in a single threaded environment, I would guess that support for concurrent multithreading would be at least in the works, if not already possible.

  • by gigasquid on 3/9/15, 5:00 PM

    A quick video if you want to see pixie startup time in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlDQTLRrcZI

  • by namelezz on 3/9/15, 8:41 AM

    Dynamic typing and parentheses are what keep me away from Clojure or Lisp like languages. How can I get over them?