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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!