ClojureWasm is no longer maintained — v1.10.1 is the final release

[chaploud]

ClojureWasm is no longer maintained. A from-scratch Clojure runtime turned out to be more than one person can sustain, so I am stopping here while it still works, rather than letting it erode.

v1.10.1 is the final release.

The substance is in v1.10.0 just before it: everything there is a fix, and three of the four came from @BuddhiLW, who reported them with diagnoses and working branches over two days. Each one's class was then swept, which is where the rest came from — a set literal of 9+ elements crashing macroexpansion turned into four fixes and a gate, and one entry point ignoring the classpath turned into a differential oracle across all six of them. v1.10.1 changes no runtime behaviour; it exists so the final tag does not document a world that has already moved on (see below).

What stays true

• The code stays up under EPL-2.0. Fork it, rename it, build on it — no permission needed from me, and no credit expected.
• The released binaries stay on the releases page, and brew install clojurewasm/tap/cljw keeps working.
• Discussions remain open. I may not answer.

What is going away

• The two hosted demos are being shut down and their repositories archived: the Playground (cw-playground) and the Bookshelf (cw-serverless-demo). Their source stays public and still builds — each builds cljw from source in its Dockerfile, so they remain a working end-to-end deployment recipe — but the URLs will stop answering.
• There will be no security fixes, including for critical vulnerabilities. SECURITY.md now says so plainly rather than listing supported versions it cannot support. If you have cljw anywhere it meets untrusted input, treat migrating off it as the fix.

What is not affected

zwasm, the WebAssembly engine ClojureWasm embeds, has moved to its own organisation and continues under separate maintainership. It is a standalone runtime, useful well beyond this project, and a vulnerability or bug there is still worth reporting — that project can act on it.

I believe ClojureWasm demonstrated what a from-scratch Clojure can be: a single small static binary, with a WebAssembly FFI. The hardest parts — and why this needs more than a solo maintainer — were keeping up JVM-Clojure compatibility (Java interop above all) and performance.

Thanks to everyone who used it, reported differences, and contributed fixes.

[BuddhiLW]

Thank you very much to create this project. I will be trying to maintain it on my fork.

But, I'm not sure if adoption will continue as great. And that speaks to the caliber of the creator!

Regards,
Pedro

[chaploud]

Update — the final release is now v1.10.1, not v1.10.0. I have edited the post above rather than leaving a stale headline.

No runtime behaviour changed — cljw is the same program. It exists because two things around the project moved within days of v1.10.0, and a final tag that documents a world which no longer exists is worse than one more patch:

• zwasm moved out of this organisation to github.com/zwasm/zwasm, where it continues under separate maintainership. The dependency now names that location directly instead of relying on GitHub's transfer redirect — a redirect is only an alias until something else claims the vacated name, which is a shape worth not depending on. Same tag, same commit, same content hash.
• The two hosted demos are being retired, so the README no longer points at URLs that will stop answering.

Two things also got fixed on the way in, both found by making the test suite report failures instead of dying on them: every nREPL end-to-end test had been leaking a server process (( cd DIR && cmd ) & makes $! the subshell, so kill $! orphans the runtime), and the accumulated memory was enough for macOS to kill an unrelated freshly-built binary — a leak that presented as a crash. Details in the changelog.

[BuddhiLW]

Hey, I notice the project notoriety has even surged even more lately. Although, hardly anyone get to notice that there is an active fork maintaining it.

Could you be kind to put it in README, pointing there? So the project can gain more life. Currently I haven't received any feedbacks. And I have grown it based on my usage. But, I'm certain more people are using it. And with some major drawbacks that I have solved or optimized on my fork https://github.com/BuddhiLW/ClojureWasm .

Would you consider it? Thanks. And I give all credits to the amazing project to you! This is gold for Clojure.

Regards,
Pedro

[BuddhiLW]

PS, if you would rather me maintain it in this repo, I would gladly bring my work here!

[chaploud]

@BuddhiLW Thanks for keeping this alive. I looked through your fork, and you've clearly put a lot of work into it.

Rather than just adding a link to the README, I'd like to hand the project over to you. I've just sent you an invitation to join the clojurewasm organization as an owner.

If you accept, it's all yours to run as you see fit. Feel free to overwrite the main repo with your fork, rewrite the org profile, the README and the notices, or reorganize the repos however you like. You don't need to ask me first, and I won't block anything. I'll stay on as an owner only as long as the handover needs, and then step out.

That said, this is just my suggestion. If you'd prefer a different setup, for example keeping your fork as the main home and just having a pointer from here, I'm happy to go with whatever works best for you.

chaploud (Shota Kudo)

[BuddhiLW]

Thank you, very much. The project is already up to date at main, and I will be glad to be taking the torch, forward.

Regards,
Pedro Gomes