ClojureDart, a port of the Clojure language that compiles to the Google-developed Dart language, has been published by Clojure consulting firm Tensegritics, with the goal of extending Clojure to mobile and desktop apps.
The primary goal of ClojureDart is to leverage Dart and Google’s Flutter development toolkit, for building multi-platform applications from a single codebase. The Clojure port, though, remains a work in progress and is not yet feature-complete. “Some features may be outright missing or partially implemented or even bugged. In any case, get in touch with us or open an issue,” the Tensegritics developers wrote on their GitHub repo. They added that they believed the current port was good enough for use by the “bravest Clojurists.”
Code for ClojureDart is available on GitHub, Tensegritics revealed on April 15. Lacking at this point are a REPL and multi-method and sorted-collection capabilities. Instructions are featured on quickly starting out with ClojureDart and Dart or Flutter.
Once positioned as a rival to JavaScript, type-safe Dart has been repositioned as a language for developing “fast apps on any platform,” including mobile and web apps. Dart has its own VM and developers can compile Dart to machine code or JavaScript.
Clojure is a language for the JVM and Microsoft’s Common Langue Runtime, serving as a dialect of Lisp with a code-as-data philosophy.
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