Comment by Jeaye

> There exists a much smaller subset of jank that is capable of compiling itself.

If your fitness test is compiler SLOC, there does indeed exist better designs. However, each of those will sacrifice performance and robustness in favor of that simplicity and concision.

I don't want to implement jank in jank. I don't think jank will ever be self-hosting. Why? Multiple reasons.

Firstly, jank isn't a systems language and in order to perform the tricks necessary for a fast runtime, I need a systems language like C++. I want jank to be the fastest Clojure around and that will require more than just a 5000 line small self-hosted compiler.

Secondly, jank has two audiences. The first audience is existing Clojure devs. A self-hosted jank would work well for them. However, the second, larger, audience is existing native devs. For them, jank needs to have an idiomatic native interface in order to embed it into their programs. The Clojure side of jank is not designed to create C++ APIs; it's designed to consume them. However, the C++ side of jank _is_ a C++ API and is designed to be a library.

Thirdly, jank's seamless interop is unprecedented for a lisp. This requires the bleeding edge (literally unreleased LLVM main, as of writing) of Clang and LLVM in order to be possible. This is necessary both for full JIT capabilities as well as the ability to seamlessly reach into C++ to use any value, function, or type, from jank, even when that requires JIT template instantiation. The typical small compiler approach of compiling to C and using TCC will not allow me to achieve this. Again, different fitness test.

> The current approach is likely going to just bog the author down, dealing with accidental complexity from c++ and llvm especially.

It sounds to me like you're designing another language, not jank. With all of this said, of course jank's design and code could be improved. I'd be able to point out more issues in jank's code than anyone, I'd wager, since I've introduced most of them. But the bulk of your point, of having less C++ and more jank, would lead to a smaller, slower, and less robust language. I will pay the cost of C++ in order to build the language I want.