16 May 2025
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 release features two significant dependency changes. First, Google Closure
Compiler has been updated to v20250402. This change makes Java 21 a
requirement for ClojureScript. The other significant change is that this release
now depends on the Clojure fork of Google Closure Library. Please read on for
more details about these changes.
For a complete list of fixes, changes, and enhancements to ClojureScript see here
Last year we noted that updating Google Closure Compiler would mean losing Java 8 support. Google Closure now requires Java 21. From our perspective this change doesn’t seem strictly necessary, but Google is a large organization and this change is likely to due to internal requirements which are hard to influence from the outside. The general enthusiasm in the Clojure community around adopting more recent Java releases hopefully softens the overall impact of this change.
So far, the burden of staying current with Google Closure has been manageable. If for some reason that calculus changes, we could adopt the strategy we have taken with Google Closure Library.
The incredible stability of Google Closure Library started declining around 2019. Google was both trying many things with respect to their internal JavaScript strategy as well as becoming less concerned about the impact on outside consumers. Finally, Google stopped contributing to Google Closure Library last August.
We have forked Google Closure Library (GCL) and taken up maintenance. We backed out a few years of needless breaking changes and aligned the codebase with the latest Google Closure Compiler release.
One of the biggest benefits of GCL is that it makes ClojureScript a complete
solution for a variety of JavaScript contexts, not limited to the browser.
Taking on additional dependencies always comes with a cost. One of
ClojureScript’s original value propositions was a rock solid set of readily
available JavaScript tools as dependable as clojure.core.
We are working on restoring that original stability. With this release, you’ll find that quite a few old ClojureScript libraries work again today as well as they did 14 years ago.
ClojureScript is not and never was only just for rich web applications. Even in the post React-world, a large portion of the web is (sensibly) still using jQuery. If you need robust DOM manipulation, internationalization, date/time handling, color value manipulation, mathematics, programmatic animation, browser history management, accessibility support, graphics, and much more, all without committing to a framework and without bloating your final JavaScript artifact - ClojureScript is a one stop shop.
Give it a try!
