Clojurists Together – Q2 2026 Open Source Funding Announcement
(www.clojuriststogether.org)
If you use Clojure for your business, please consider funding this effort and also directly developers who work on software that you use. It makes for a sustainable ecosystem.
replyThe Clojure community is very mature and incredibly nice, so things are not bad as they are, but they could definitely be better.
I try to set aside a portion of my business revenue (I call it a "sustainability fee" in my P&L) and spread it among the authors of libraries that I use. It's not much for each author, but if everybody did this, many authors could work on open source libraries full time.
what needs funding is clojure core, this is a nice effort to try to fill a gap but what my business needs, and other business owners tell me they need, is for the core language (clojure and clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart. I want to invest my money in targeted, specific high value problems and get leverage on my money by sharing the cost with other business owners who need the same issues fixed. Until such a vector exists, the next best thing (for my business) is to fund a few key maintainers directly via github sponsorship. But because it is indirect and not outcomes-driven, the money amounts will be smaller. My business can afford to invest more than the $2400 per year that we have been donating since the release of Electric. My business has employed 4 devs for 5+ years, I can find more budget for investments in Clojure. But there is no vector to invest in the specific core issues that would benefit my business to improve.
replyI wasn't aware of the Gloat project before this. It's a compiler that turns Clojure into native binaries by first transpiling to Glojure (which I'd also never heard of before this), which in turn targets Go. This is rather than using a GraalVM native image, which as I understand it is at this point the better-explored mechanism of doing that for JVM-based stuff (but has its own trade-offs).
replyVery cool!
I can see why people try this way: graalvm is limited outside the entreprise version, and it’s quite slow to compile with.
replyI think the aot compilation story on the JVM lacks fast tooling with good UX compared to go.
Reminds me of S.P.A.T from about a boy.
replyHow is the demonym not Clojuristas?
replyMaybe clojure wouldn't have had it's nubank "exit" if we'd called ourselves clojuristas but this old clojure lefty loves it.
replyThe demonym I've most commonly seen is Clojurian.
replyClojurist makes it sound like adherents to a belief, which does imply identity though Clojurian more directly so. I’ve also found Clojurian most often. If only we had software that indexed the popularity of words…
replyIn that case, Clojurians can be used for new initiates and Clojurists can be used for the most dogmatic Clojure supremacists, like myself.
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replyTwo of these projects are just AI. This is not very promising.
replyNeither of them is AI genetated software though. One is a fast Clojure LLM inference library, and the other a MCP server, both coded by humans, without AI.
replyI know at least one of them and it has already existed for a decade or so, and is a legit framework, so this isn’t some hype based thing.
replyAnd Clojure is legitimately good at data processing.
The MCP server is a relatively simple project, don’t think that’s a bad idea.