alt Hacker NewsJolt: Clojure compiler implemented with Chez Scheme
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This appears to be vibecoded but not disclosed as such. 2k commits from a single author starting from June 1st with really long commit messages and source code comments. The GitHub org has 19 additional projects that are all recently created.
edit: Yup, found a very long blog post that says it's made with LLMs near the end https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-07-02-jolt.html
What a wonderful excuse to dive back into Clojure! This looks fantastic. I wonder what neat stuff might be made in Clojure thanks to a C FFI that wasn’t doable on top of the JVM.
How much does this overlap / complements something like jank ? [1]
How much "production ready" / "battle tested" would this be ?
(Not to start a flame war, I'm genuinely curious about the differences.)
Besides this and jank, there is also Janet; playing in the league of Lisp to standalone binaries. It’s also cool!
I understand some don’t like having a JVM, but for running in the browser, what does Jolt on Gambit offer over plain ClojureScript?
I just saw this - works great to build small self contained apps. (I just tested on macOS, also supports Linux).
How many years have it been there? My memory reminds me of Jolt but I very hardly remember what was it, all I remember is that it was a LISP.
Nice to see further adoption from Chez Scheme.
Have to give it a try.
See also lg which is a clojure implemented in go:
https://github.com/nooga/let-go
Fun fact. It also runs on plan9:
it's good to have even more (and more slim!) ways to run Clojure
(not just JVM and JavaScript runtimes)
As a more-or-less neutral observation (I still kind-of like the project): What I find curious - perhaps a sign of these times: After just 2-3 months in development (judging from the repo commits, obviously I have no insight into what came before), the developer already communicates Jolt as a feature-complete, polished (perhaps even mature) Clojure dialect with multiple Jolt-adapted libraries from JVM-Clojure, FFI, Fibers, already with a professional looking and marketing-focussed website, detailled documentation, nREPL support, etc. Things I wouldn’t expect so soon from a language developed (mostly?) by a single person in such an early release stage.
I don’t know how to get a feeling about the actual state of projects like this anymore, so I always remain a bit suspicious. In Clojure, there is the (Rich Hickey inspired) design philosophy of “hammock driven development”, where we don’t rush things, let them simmer while lying in the hammock, sleeping on them, taking a walk, etc. Makes me wonder if projects like this are too rushed these days without thinking things through, discussing design decisions and getting ideas from other people, letting them mature over time. This isn’t specifically about Jolt (I don’t know much about it or its creator), it just inspired the thought, especially when comparing it to projects like Jank which has been years in development, with lots of feedback from the community and Clojure core maintainers as input.