If you're anything like me, you got into programming to make video games. Eventually you found the Lispest Lisp, and now you can't imagine building a game without your REPL. But everyone knows a "real" game ships to Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo, and for various wise reasons, existing Clojure implementations do not.

Being immune to wisdom, I lobotomized ClojureCLR and Lua and glued them together with a new runtime and a JIT-enabled bytecode compiler, keeping ClojureCLR's data structures. Silk is the first Clojure able to ship to Desktop, iOS, Android, Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation. It keeps eval, defmacro, and a live REPL on locked-down platforms without the runtime code generation every other Clojure needs to boot. As a fun side effect, it can compile static binaries, like Go, via a self-hosted compiler.

Visit with some language hackery and join me at the end of this 10-year rabbit hole to uncover what it takes to smuggle Clojure into statically compiled video games.

James Tolton

Indie game dev, content creator, and language hacker. Author of libapl-clj, libscryer-clj, and scrypy, designer of libpython-clj's user-facing API, and architect of the Silk programming language.