I made a Clojure-like language in Go, boots in 7ms
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…
In plain words
Let-go is a Clojure-like language written in pure Go that achieves approximately 90% compatibility with JVM Clojure. It runs as a ~10MB static binary with 7ms cold boot time, roughly 50x faster than JVM Clojure and 3x faster than Babashka. The language includes an nREPL server compatible with standard Clojure editors, supports embedding in Go programs, and performs well on algorithmic workloads. It is suitable for writing CLIs, web servers, data processing scripts, and systems programming tasks.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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!
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Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
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Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
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Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com