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  • 9 min read

Gloat Q2 Grant Halfway Report

We are halfway through the Q2 2026 Clojurists Together funding cycle, so this is a good time to report what has been done for Gloat and Glojure.

The grant officially started on May 1, but since I had learned that it was accepted a couple weeks earlier, I got too excited and decided to start working on it immediately. I was able to quickly get Glojure to pass the entire Clojure Compatibility Test Suite; except for 9 tests that are skipped as being not feasible. That gave Gloat a much stronger base to build on.

Since the start of the grant period, Gloat and Glojure have had over 20 releases, with Gloat moving from v0.1.26 to v0.1.50. The Glojure work was all being done on the long running fork gloathub/glojure, but I'm thrilled to announce that as of today, the work has been fully moved back to the upstream glojurelang/glojure and will continue to be maintained and released from there.

My overall ambition for Gloat is to have Clojure be as full featured and prominent to Go programming as it is to Java. The industry is crazy about Go. Let's get it crazy about Clojure.

Furthermore, given that Go cross-compiles to almost everywhere, I am bullish on Gloat being a serious alternative to GraalVM's native-image compiler. An alternative with fast compilation, expansive compilation targets (including WebAssembly) and completely open source licensing.

  • 2 min read

Gloat Funded for Q2 2026!

by Clojurists Together

Today my Clojurists Together Q2 2026 funding cycle officially starts, and I'll be heads-down on Gloat.

If you've been following along, you know what Gloat is. If not: Gloat is an ahead-of-time compiler that takes Clojure code - by way of Glojure (Clojure on Go) - through the Go toolchain, and produces, depending on what you need:

  • Go source and packages with the build files to go with them, ready to drop into a Go project.
  • Native binaries, cross-compiled to ~25 target architectures from a single host.
  • Wasm modules for both the browser and the server.
  • Native shared libraries that other languages can link against. There are already FFI binding examples in 20+ languages.

The short version: Gloat is shaping up to be a complete alternative to GraalVM's native-image for Clojure. Faster build times, much wider platform reach, and 100% open source. It already works. What it needs now is smaller and faster output, and a lot more real-world Clojure code thrown at it.

About the Funding

Clojurists Together is funded by individuals and companies who believe Clojure deserves a healthy long tail of tools and libraries. If you're one of them - thank you. You make this kind of work possible, and you make it sustainable for the people doing it. If you're not, maybe you should be: clojuriststogether.org.

Funding Goals for Gloat

Smaller, faster binaries.

Gloat compiles Clojure to binary much faster than GraalVM does but the results need to be smaler and faster. Some of this is already in motion - there's a clojure.core tree-shaking extension (-Xprune) that drops the parts of core a given program doesn't actually use. There's plenty more to do; output size and runtime speed need a lot of improvement for Gloat to be a viable daily-driver replacement for GraalVM.

Pass the Clojure Compatibility Test Suite.

The path to "Gloat works on your real codebase" runs straight through CCTS. Every test we pass is one less surprise the first time someone points Gloat at production code.

Tutorial docs.

Two stories that need to be easy to follow from a fresh checkout:

  • How to use Gloat to integrate Clojure into a Go project.
  • How to use Gloat instead of GraalVM to (cross-)compile Clojure programs to native binaries, shared libraries, and Wasm modules.

How to Join the Efforts

Progress posts will land here on the blog, with shorter updates in the Clojurians Slack. Issues, PRs, and design questions on the GitHub repo are all welcome. I especially want to hear from people with real Clojure codebases they'd like to run through Gloat - Go integration, native binary, shared library, Wasm, doesn't matter. Concrete use cases sharpen everything.

Thanks

To Clojurists Together, the Q2 2026 reviewers, and every person and company funding the program: thank you. To everyone who has filed an issue, suggested a benchmark, or asked a sharp question along the way - thank you too. The project is better for you.

Now to work!