24 January 2024
ClojureScript Team
We’re happy to announce a new release of ClojureScript. If you’re an existing user of ClojureScript please read over the following release notes carefully.
This is primarily a bugfix release.
For a complete list of fixes, changes, and enhancements to ClojureScript see here
This will probably be the last ClojureScript release to support Java 8 as Google Closure Compiler now requires Java 11.
Google has stopped developing Google Closure Library. What does this mean for the future of ClojureScript? Not a whole lot. Google Closure Library is a project distinct from the Compiler that provides a large set of reusable battle-tested libraries that are Closure-compatible. As browsers and the JavaScript ecosystem have evolved, this project has become less important to Google.
Google is not going to remove Google Closure Library (GCL), remove the API docs, or doing anything that would be detrimental to ClojureScript. Note that Google stopped providing regular releases many years ago - ClojureScript uses an artifact that we release ourselves. Even if Google did remove GCL from the Internet, we could still continue to provide the artifact and docs ourselves.
The standard library, cljs.core, uses GCL in relatively simple ways, most of
which could be replaced easily. This will likely happen over time and community
contributions are welcome in this effort.
The various built-in REPLs (Browser, Node) use a bit more GCL functionality and could also be evolved gradually over time.
None of the above changes that we generate Google Closure Compiler compatible JavaScript and will continue to do so. Google itself embraced the wider JavaScript ecosystem, but they also transpile everything into Google Closure Compiler compatible JS (via tsickle) before finally processing it with Google Closure Compiler.
As always, we do not believe in creating meaningless churn for users. You can continue
to rely on GCL in its current form for years. You can expect various base
GCL namespaces (goog.string, goog.object, etc.) to be available as before.
Looking towards the future, it is worth assessing Google’s approach with tsickle to get the benefits of Closure advanced compilation without losing the ease provided by the JavaScript ecosystem.
