jank blog

jank's new persistent string is fast

2023-12-30T00:00:00Z

One thing I've been meaning to do is build a custom string class for jank. I had some time, during the holidays, between wrapping up this quarter's work and starting on next quarter's, so I decided to see if I could beat both std::string and folly::fbstring, in terms of performance. After all, if we're gonna make a string class, it'll need to be fast. :)

jank development update - Load all the modules!

2023-12-17T00:00:00Z

I've been quiet for the past couple of months, finishing up this work on jank's module loading, class path handling, aliasing, and var referring. Along the way, I ran into some very interesting bugs and we're in for a treat of technical detail in this holiday edition of jank development updates! A warm shout out to my Github sponsors and Clojurists Together for sponsoring this work.

jank development update - Module loading

2023-10-14T00:00:00Z

For the past month and a half, I've been building out jank's support for clojure.core/require, including everything from class path handling to compiling jank files to intermediate code written to the filesystem. This is a half-way report for the quarter. As a warm note, my work on jank this quarter is being sponsored by Clojurists Together.

jank development update - Object model results

2023-08-26T00:00:00Z

As summer draws to a close, in the Pacific Northwest, so too does my term of sponsored work focused on a faster object model for jank. Thanks so much to Clojurists Together for funding jank's development. The past quarter has been quite successful and I'm excited to share the results.

jank development update - A faster object model

2023-07-08T00:00:00Z

This quarter, my work on jank is being sponsored by Clojurists Together. The terms of the work are to research a new object model for jank, with the goal of making jank code faster across the board. This is a half-way report and I'm excited to share my results!

jank development update - Optimizing a ray tracer

2023-04-07T00:00:00Z

After the last post, which focused on optimizing jank's sequences, I wanted to get jank running a ray tracer I had previously written in Clojure. In this post, I document what was required to start ray tracing in jank and, more importantly, how I chased down the run time in a fierce battle with Clojure's performance.

jank development update - Optimizing sequences

2023-01-13T00:00:00Z

In this episode of jank's development updates, we follow an exciting few weekends as I was digging deep into Clojure's sequence implementation, building jank's equivalent, and then benchmarking and profiling in a dizzying race to the bottom.

jank development update - Lots of new changes

2022-12-08T00:00:00Z

I was previously giving updates only in the #jank Slack channel, but some of these are getting large enough to warrant more prose. Thus, happily, I can announce that jank has a new blog and I have a lot of new progress to report! Let's get into the details.