I've been keeping my eye on jank for a few years and it's amazing how much progress has been made since the creator went full time on it and the number of contributors has increased. I'm incredibly excited for the alpha release in December.

It's worth noting that now Clojure becomes like the One Ring "... to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" when it comes to surface area. You've got the classic Clojure hosted on Java, then you've got Babashka as a Bash/Python/Perl replacement for scripts, ClojureScript for the Web and Node, ClojureDart for Flutter app development, and now finally you can drop down and interop with a systems language (the imgui demo in the blog post is already cool!).

The elephant in the room is Rust which kinda delivers a similar outcome, write one language for web servers, desktop apps, embedded devices, games, CLI tools, phone apps, web apps and so on. But the way they go about accomplishing that couldn't be more different. At this point I'm primed to go for the punk option of choosing jank over Rust because while rust-analyzer is amazing in its own right to aid you towards "if it compiles then it works" the REPL-driven development flow provided by Clojure/jank cannot be overlooked.

I can't overstate how hyped I am for jank's alpha release and I love these periodic status updates!