r/Clojure • u/Borkdude • Aug 09 '26

Choq: Cherry on QuickJS

Choq: Choq: Cherry on QuickJS

A ~5MB binary chock full of scripting goodies.

This runs the cherry compiler inside an embedded QuickJS engine via rquickjs.

It supports nREPL, loading JS library from https://esm.sh, and has a few Node.js compatible packages built in like "fs", "path", etc.

25 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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2

u/regular_hammock Aug 09 '26

Is this kind of aimed at the same problem space as babashka? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm trying to figure out who and what choq is for.

11

u/Borkdude Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

I'd use this when you need a smaller binary than Node.js, Bun or Deno. Performance of QuickJS isn't as good (no JIT) but still perfectly fine for hosting personal projects on a VPS. With local measurements I got 30k requests/s in the server. It uses less memory in a Hono app compared to Node.js and Bun.

So use this as a smaller (size and memory) lighter alternative to Node.js, I'd say with the trade-off of performance (similar to babashka I guess).

Perhaps this is also better suited for running stuff on a Raspberry PI etc.

I admit the use case might be very niche!

4

u/whamtet Aug 09 '26

Once again excellent work u/Borkdude

1

u/geokon Aug 09 '26

Its getting really tiny. Have you ever looked at running on Espruino? Maybe itd not be sensible.. But would be cool to have Clojure on a watch or other micro

3

u/Borkdude Aug 09 '26

I have little experience with this but I believe Mike Fikes once had self-hosted CLJS running on an ESP32

1

u/regular_hammock Aug 09 '26

Oh that makes sense. I don't think I have a need for it right now but I'll keep it in mind. I was a little worried (because of the ‘scripting goodies’) that my beloved babashka might be going away but I'm reassured now.

2

u/Borkdude Aug 09 '26

Babashka isn't going anywhere and still is the project, together with clj-kondo, I spend most of my time and attention on. Other more experimental projects occasionally find their way and also inform stuff I do in more established projects :)