Workshop report: Hi-perf Clojurescript with WebGL, asm.js and Emscripten

Too Long; Didn't Read

The majority of Clojurescript application development and community discussions seems to be focused on improving standard UI implementation patterns and the general workflow of how we can build web applications better, easier and faster. In this respect it’s been truly amazing to observe how much has been achieved in so short time (especially over the past 2 years) and I think by now Clojurescript and the tooling enabled by it, really does offer an outstanding, <em>simple</em> and largely joyful web development experience. Since the language is mainly targeting the browser environment, it’s maybe also about time to become an ever more attractive choice for building apps utilizing the full feature set of what the modern browser environment offers and here I’m thinking mainly about applications going beyond those usually built with Clojurescript thus far. When it comes to working with features like WebGL, WebAudio, WebRTC, WebWorkers, building data and graphics intensive, visualization related or generally highly interactive and media rich web applications, games etc., Clojurescript tooling / library support and feasibility suddenly have been still questionable and it’s something myself (and others) have been actively working on to fix over the past few years. The primary approach to work with these features then has been via existing Javascript libraries, often requiring large amounts of interop code and having to deal with issues that don’t fit that nicely with the Clojurescript modus operandi.