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- Hacker News
- I wonder how Janet compares to Jolt and when should you choose one vs another.by iLemming
- When I first started Janet, I had a conversation along these lines: Would I stay when Jank was ready?
Now, Jank is sort of ready. Jolt seems ready. But actually the whole Clojure ecosystem seems bloated in various ways. Java interop being idiomatic is the worst part of Clojure, and can't be undone. Though I prefer some aspects to Janet (better naming, pure functions/standard library), I like Janet's tooling more! I like Janet's imports and compilation model more (everything out of main is compile time)! I've been thinking about a Janet2 for a while: https://alexalejandre.com/notes/janet2/ and I think the real gains are in the opposite direction of Clojure: e.g. optional times for 10-20x speed ups (coming very, very soon) or correctness. In particular, I love array and logic language ideas (Clojure lacking pattern matching was... a choice.)
Generally speaking, I anticipate Jolt will make sense in more use cases, but Janet has more of a focus on cute DSLs like sh-dsl.
by veqq - I only really know Janet by going through "Janet for Mortals" - so I'm by no means an expert
But while it superficially has similar syntax to Clojure, it's fundamentally a very very different language. You don't have immutable data-structure. It's intended to be used in an imperative way. It's extremely minimal in a kind of Scheme-y way. It's sort of like Scheme with more creature comforts. It was a very interesting PEG system for building DSLs and an innovative "runtime" where the program state is also a Janet program in an of itself. It's very weird and has new paradigms.
In the end I wasn't sure where I'd ever really want to use it though. Maybe similar scenarios as Scheme? If I wanted a scripting language where the whole language is something I could keep in my head.
by geokon