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Comment by ricree | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't mind a .net version, but other than that I agree that clojure loses a lot of its benefit over other lisps if it isn't tied to an existing runtime and library set.

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Back before it was a public project, there apparently was a Clojure on .net. It appears, however, that it is now pretty firmly matched to the JVM.

Given its present state, it would be about as hard to separate Clojure from the JVM as Java.

Perhaps someone will rip off its ideas and create L#.

I heard a rumor a few weeks ago that someone had Clojure running on IKVM. I'm sure it would be slow as hell right now; but it'd probably be OK for toying around with.

Given that clojure "embraces the platform", it'd probably be pretty hard to have clojure.net _without_ ikvm in there somewhere. Performance could be increased by porting the code generator and core classes to .net, but users expect to use arbitrary java libraries, so that capability has to be there.

(Seems like that strategy could also be applicable to a native port, using an embedded jvm to handle whatever has not been ported from java land)

and FWIW (i have little .net knowledge)

    ubuntu:~% ikvm -jar clojure.jar
    Clojure
    user=> (. cli.System.IO.File OpenText "/dev/null")
    #<StreamReader System.IO.StreamReader>

(startup takes about 6x times as long with ikvm than java -client. compiling with ikvmc creates a clojure.exe which instead takes 9x to start. clojure-1240 non-slim, java 1.6.0_07, ikvm 0.34.0.4, mono 1.9.1)

That's pretty interesting... Does mono have a native image generator like ngen? You might be able to get some performance improvements if it does.

It does, but given how quickly it runs, I can't think it's doing that much? I remember playing with it a while ago and not seeing any performance worth remembering.

Apparently the latest version of mono has much better AOT support, and performance improvements as well.

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