ClojureScript forks Google Closure Library to guarantee backward compatibility
7 comments
·May 16, 2025lukev
One of my favorite things about the JVM ecosystem is how stable it is. A 5-year-old library will almost certainly Just Work. And Clojure very much follows the same spirit. There's a lot of great, useful libraries that haven't been updated in years... not because they've been abandoned but because they're _done_ and just don't require active maintenance.
Immutability as a cultural value, not just a data structure.
paulddraper
Forking solely to keep compatibility with a Java version released >10 years years ago, with EOL next year [1] is crazy.
More power to you. But a crazy use of time.
moomin
They’ve forked the library, not the compiler. The Java version thing they’ve taken the hit on. (The HN title is incorrect.)
Borkdude
Updated the title
Borkdude
This is not about maintaining compatibility with a Java version. As you can read in the post, Java 21 will be the minimum required Java version even. It's about the Google Closure Library on which many ClojureScript programs depend.
null
> We are working on restoring that original stability. With this release, you’ll find that quite a few old ClojureScript libraries work again today as well as they did 14 years ago.
> ClojureScript is and never was only just for rich web applications. Even in the post React-world, a large portion of the web is (sensibly) still using jQuery. If you need robust DOM manipulation, internationalization, date/time handling, color value manipulation, mathematics, programmatic animation, browser history management, accessibility support, graphics, and much more, all without committing to a framework and without bloating your final JavaScript artifact - ClojureScript is a one stop shop.