Read this first!

Clojure issue tracking now lives at http://dev.clojure.org/jira, and the wiki is at http://dev.clojure.org. These Assembla pages are kept online for historical interest only.

This is a page for design work on a new compiler written in Clojure. It is not a promise of such a compiler, nor of any features.

 

• Write the Clojure compiler in Clojure so all future enhancements will involve Clojure coding
• Make more people familiar with the operation of the compiler
• Host independence
  • Ease porting
• All Clojure?
  • Some RT?
• Analysis phase produces well-documented AST as Clojure data
• Improvements over current compiler
  • fully functional, no dynamic vars
  • threaded immutable environment
  • more separation of host concerns
    • type reflection etc
• Move ASM out of clojure.jar
  • use ASM instead of reflection for type info
  • move to more current ASM
• Think about future features like:  
  • letmacro
  • primitive args/returns in fns
• Tackle namespace issues?
  • Namespaces follow classes
    • thus can follow schemes like OSGi
  • Get rid of global namespace registries?
  • Get rid of mapping classnames -> class instances
• Backends
  • Experiment with generating Java source?
  • ASM
  • CLR/DLR
  • JS
  • ?