Re:Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp
by capableweb on Thursday May 14, 2020 @01:12PM
(#23182246)
I hear you, GraalVM is pretty new and while I've managed to write and deploy plenty of clis using it without any problems, it's a big hassle to deal with anything GUI or server related. So it does have a long way to go.
And while Babashka is not Clojure, it's interpreter (sci - https://github.com/borkdude/sci) is in fact a "Small Clojure Interpreter" that tries to stay as close to Clojure as possible. Unless you're using the Java interop, I've yet to hit anything I cannot do in Babashka that I could do in Clojure (I barely use Java interop)
GraalVM simply is not production-ready, though I follow its progress with great interest. That said, it's hard to compare the process of integrating with GraalVM against a language that actually just has fast startup.
Babashka is pretty cool, but it's another example of something that isn't quite Clojure. Nice if you can tolerate various "almost the same" languages, but Clojure itself is still weak in these domains.