Clojure beyond the JVM — native binaries, WebAssembly, instant startup.
Important
These projects are no longer actively developed. Building independent language runtimes from scratch turned out to be more than one person can sustain, so they stop here while they still work rather than eroding quietly.
Everything stays public under its original licence — read it, fork it, rename it, build on it. No permission needed and no credit expected.
The one thing that continues is zwasm, which has moved to its own organisation and is actively maintained there.
ClojureWasm — a Clojure runtime in Zig
A from-scratch Clojure implementation with no JVM: a single small native binary that starts in milliseconds, and a WebAssembly FFI that lets Clojure call modules compiled from Rust, Go, Zig or C as if they were ordinary functions.
No longer maintained.
v1.10.1 is
the final release, and the released binaries stay up — brew install clojurewasm/tap/cljw still works. The repository stays open and unarchived so
it remains forkable; Issues are off and Pull Requests will not be reviewed, but
Discussions are open
and the announcement
explains the wind-down. There are no security fixes — do not run it against
untrusted input.
Kiso — a ClojureScript compiler in TypeScript
An experimental ClojureScript-to-JavaScript compiler plus the su component framework, with zero dependencies. Archived.
ClojureWit — Clojure to WebAssembly components
Compiling Clojure source into WIT-typed WebAssembly components. Archived.
zwasm — the fast, spec-compliant WebAssembly runtime in Zig that ClojureWasm embeds — left this organisation for its own, where it continues under active, separate maintainership. It is a standalone runtime useful well beyond Clojure, with a JIT, AOT compilation, WASI 0.3 and the Component Model. If you came here for the WebAssembly part, that is where to go — and where a bug report can still be acted on.
Two demo applications and a games collection — the Playground, the Bookshelf,
and cw-arcade — are archived and their hosted instances shut down. Their source
stays public: each built cljw from source in its Dockerfile, so they remain
a complete worked example of deploying this runtime end to end.
Thanks to everyone who used these, reported differences, and contributed fixes.