On 2025-05-18, the Clojure visual-tools group had its 34th meeting.
In this meeting, we explored several promising technical directions, all of which are related to our goal of creating friendly tooling for Clojure newcomers. Most were early-stage explorations of topics that we will likely revisit in future meetings. Many thanks to the speakers who were open to sharing their knowledge and experience.
Brief summary
- Clojure in WebAssembly
- @roman01la gave an overview following the Running Clojure in WASM blog post – see the demo repo.
- (also talked about WASI and WASMGC)
- We discussed the way the current pathway relies on GraalVM native compilation, and the hope to explore a babashka-like solution based on the Small Clojure Interpreter.
- @Shagun_Agrawal added a few details following the Compiling Clojure to WebAssembly blog post, showing a slightly different workflow and the way it was used to run cljcc, a toy C compiler, in the browser.
- We wondered about the potential of the WASM pathway for creating interactive tutorials.
- docker-nrepl.el - Andrey Subbotin discussed Docker, nREPL, and the new docker-nrepl.el package to connect them in Emacs.
- nrepl-ws and Clay - @alza-bitz discussed the new nrepl-ws-server, nrepl-ws-client, and a browser UI for Clay for beginner-friendly visual exploration.
- a coding sandbox - @roman01la discussed recent experiences creating a Coding Sandbox following the Making a coding sandbox on serverless platform blog post, and briefly discussed Modal and Coder (VS Code server).
Recording
The full recording was shared internally as an ulisted video at the #visual-tools > meeting-34 at the Clojurians Zulip topic #visual-tools channel of the Clojurians Slack.
We are sharing a partial recording here with the talk by @alza-bitz.
