Jolt: running Clojure on Chez Scheme🔒 SSL Verified

Table of Contents

• ↓ Why Chez Scheme?
• ↓ What Works Today
• ↓ Under the Hood
• ↓ Why Not Just Wait for Leyden?
• ↓ Desktop and Native Interop
• ↓ Deployment and Architecture
• ↓ Top Alternatives to yogthos.net

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"(iterate   think   thoughts)"

"I've been working on a new Clojure implementation targeting Chez Scheme, and it's now at a point where I'd like to share it more broadly in hopes that it might be useful to others. This post will explain the rationale behind the project, its current status, and why it may be of interest."

"My main goal was to make a drop-in replacement for JVM Clojure which had a fast startup and a light memory footprint. If you look under the hood of Jolt you'll quickly see why Chez Scheme is a great choice for hosting Clojure. Since both languages share the same Lisp roots, the core semantics of Clojure map seamlessly to Scheme, avoiding the impedance mismatch associated with forcing functional paradigms onto something like the JVM. Chez brings a mature JIT compiler to the table that can aggressively optimize the emitted code while maintaining a reasonably small runtime footprint. You also get a highly tuned generational garbage collector that is practically purpose built to handle the rapid allocation and deallocation of immutable data structures inherent to Clojure workflows. Finally, Chez runs natively across a wide variety of operating systems, so you end up getting lean native binaries with instant startup times rather than hauling around a heavy Java environment."

"While the JVM is an incredibly powerful piece of engineering, it also happens to be one of the biggest reasons developers cite when passing on Clojure. The Java runtime evolved in an era of enterprise architecture, designed for massive application servers like Tomcat or WebSphere which were effectively their own operating systems. In that model the application server would greedily consume all available host memory and run continuously for months on end, making long JVM startup phases and heavy initial resource footprints perfectly acceptable trade-offs. But that monolithic design clashes with how modern web applications are typically built, especially in fast-paced startup environments where the engineering culture has shifted toward microservices. Today, you typically want to deploy fleets of isolated containers that boot instantly and can dynamically scale horizontally to handle sudden traffic spikes. Hauling around a massive warmed up Java environment just to run a lightweight standalone service goes directly against that principle."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for yogthos.net:

Why Chez Scheme?

What Works Today

Under the Hood

Why Not Just Wait for Leyden?

Desktop and Native Interop

Deployment and Architecture