go-joker

I forked Joker because I wanted a Clojure-like extension language inside gi, without starting a JVM. The original interpreter was useful for scripting and linting, but loops and arithmetic were slow enough to get in the way. Most of the work went into making those parts faster while keeping the tree-walker available for code the compiler cannot handle.

The fork also has a browser notebook, graphics and PDF libraries, and an HTTP server. I use it as a small, self-contained place to run Clojure code and inspect what it does.

The reader and parser build expressions that can take one of five execution paths. Eligible recursive integer functions become native Go closures; numeric loops can run through wazero's WebAssembly JIT. Typed IR handles primitive values without boxing, boxed IR handles collections, and the tree-walker executes the remaining forms. Which path runs depends on the expression.

Performance depends on the code you write and which execution path it takes. The benchmarks compare portable Joker programs and native helpers separately, alongside Python, Bun, Goja and let-go.