So far, almost all interest comes from within the Clojure community. Getting people from outside of Clojure requires a lot of education around Lisps, FP, data-oriented programming, interactive programming, etc. It's a whole paradigm shift. I will tackle that, but I'm starting within the Clojure community first.
Mainly, the people interested in jank are the same folks interested in making Graal native images from their uberjars, combined with the folks interested in using some native lib from their Clojure code, combined with people who use Clojure reluctantly because they don't like the JVM. jank is significantly lighter, faster to start up, and has competitive runtime performance compared to the JVM.
Clojure is fast because of the JVM, not because it's a great compiler/runtime. jank is fast because of LLVM, yes, but also because a lot of work is going into the compiler/runtime to make it fast.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer, that’s super interesting. Presumably these folks don’t need Java libraries (which for my own use cases I needed pretty much from the jump) and are doing either vanilla Clojure stuff or things that they know have c++ libraries. And if they care about startup it’s not the common “long running web server process” scenario (maybe lambda, native app, things along those lines). Anyway I asked mainly because it’s always cool to hear about parts of computing and Clojure ecosystem I am not familiar with, thanks for answering.
Mainly, the people interested in jank are the same folks interested in making Graal native images from their uberjars, combined with the folks interested in using some native lib from their Clojure code, combined with people who use Clojure reluctantly because they don't like the JVM. jank is significantly lighter, faster to start up, and has competitive runtime performance compared to the JVM.
Clojure is fast because of the JVM, not because it's a great compiler/runtime. jank is fast because of LLVM, yes, but also because a lot of work is going into the compiler/runtime to make it fast.