Clojure Scripting on Node.js (opens in new tab)

What's the difference between this and Clojurescript?

What kind of differences/limitations are there when interpreting Clojurescript (nbb) as opposed to compiling it (shadow-cljs, lein, self-hosted?, other things?)?

I'm not sure if this applies to nbb, but there's a command line flag for the node repl (`--experimental-repl-await`) which allows you to use await in the repl, allowing you to kind of sidestep the normal annoyance of handling promises.

There was a self-hosted CLJS project for Node.js which is now abandoned. It was called lumo. It came with a custom image of Node.js with lumo built-in for better startup times since the JS bundle of self-hosted CLJS is quite large resulting in not so great startup out of the box. Nbb is just a library that you can use with any Node.js version. That said, it might be worth revisiting the self-hosted CLJS approach at some point.

Clojure/Clojurescript is a functional lisp dialect and therefore brings you more and other ways to write programs, since it defers much from javascript/typescript. But I think another question would be "why do you need nbb for clojurescript?". The minimal answer is: clojure has slow startup time, and clojurescript need some tooling to produce runnable code. With nbb (or bb for clojure) you can run Clojurescript as a scripting language in the terminal, like python or shell, and still use some libraries both from the nodejs or clojure(-script) ecosystem.

Author here. Nbb is a scripting environment for Clojure running on Node.js. Clojure is a Lisp that emphasises functional and data oriented programming. Scripts are executed using an interpreter, so there is no build/compile step necessary, which is convenient for small applications.

If you're more curious, check out the README which has a list of videos and articles on this.

Clojure is a lisp dialect (One of the most loved languages according to surveys). You can use nbb to write clojure instead of js in Node.

https://tryclojure.org/ in case you want to try it!

Clojure is a lisp on the jvm. javascript compilers exist because people wanted to use clojure in web related projects.

Clojure is a lisp like language hosted on top of the JVM. By running on top of node you get a faster startup which is desirable for short lived apps.

Nbb still has faster startup time with any system-installed Node.js than lumo with its v8 snapshot.

This is actually really nifty. However can you change it to be asynchronous instead? Right now the polyglot runs synchronously.

What about the stdout/stderr... It ultimately has to give you back a child process. Could there be a spawn version that gives you the child process too?