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I made a Clojure-like language in Go, boots in 7ms

Details

External ID
48076815
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
I made a Clojure-like language in Go, boots in 7ms
Website domain
github.com
Launched
May 9, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
292
Upvotes percentile
0.9773828756058158
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Let-go is a Clojure-like language (~90% compatible with JVM Clojure) written in pure Go. It ships as a ~10MB static binary and cold boots in ~7ms - that's about 50x faster than JVM and 3x faster than Babashka. It has decent throughput on algorithmic workloads - within ballpark of the GraalVM-backed sci.I started this project in 2021 as an elaborate practical joke: I wanted to have an excuse for writing Clojure while pretending to write Go.Jokes aside, it turned out to be pretty decent: it feels like real Clojure, it has an nREPL server (supported in Calva, CIDER, etc.), it's easily embeddable in your Go programs (funcs, structs and channels cross the boundary without fuss). It's good for writing CLIs, web servers, data processing scripts and even doing some systems programming - I used it to write a deamonless container runtime. Oh, and it runs on Plan9.Under the hood there is a fairly simple compiler and a stack VM, both handcrafted specifically for running Clojure-like code. The compiler can work in AOT mode producing portable bytecode blobs and standalone binaries (runtime+bytecode).This is not a drop-in replacement for Clojure in general - it does not load JARs, it does not have all Java APIs and it most probably won't run your exiting Clojure projects without modifications. At least not at the moment.Take it for a spin, tell me what you think. Issues and PRs are welcome!

Enrichment

Theme
lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
clojure-like language compiler in go
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Building an interpreter or compiler that reaches 90% compatibility with Clojure's complex semantics and high-performance runtime requires deep computer science expertise in persistent data structures, macro expansion engines, and runtime optimization.

What it would actually take: A real version requires implementing Clojure's reader and AST in Go, along with persistent immutable data structures like Hash Array Mapped Tries (HAMT) and 32-way branching vector tries. It also requires an evaluation engine or bytecode VM supporting Clojure's sequence abstractions, metadata, protocols, and concurrency primitives. The hardest part is achieving parity with Clojure's extensive standard library while maintaining single-digit millisecond cold boot times and competitive throughput, requiring an expert in programming language implementation and runtime design.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Clojure, Janet, Fennel, jank, Gojure

Concerns raised: Project Leyden may make startup-time-focused projects redundant, Janet standard library outputs mutable structures vs pure functions, Difficulty wrapping arbitrary Go libraries without building into runtime

Feature requests: More native Plan9 CLI port, Go as first-class language on 9front

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 124 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #5 of 125 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 189 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

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