Is shipping a Clojure desktop app realistic?

Posted by Cedric Martin on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Cedric Martin
Published on 2012-09-18T19:52:57Z Indexed on 2012/09/18 21:52 UTC
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I'm currently shipping a desktop Java application. It is a plain old Java 5 Java / Swing app and so far everything worked nicely. Java 5 was targetted because some users were on OS X version / computers that shall never have Java 6 (we may lift this limitation soon and switch to a newer Java and simply abandoning my users stuck with Java 5).

I'm quickly getting up to speed with Clojure but I haven't really done lots of Clojure-to-Java and Java-to-Clojure yet and I was wondering if it was realistic to ship a Clojure desktop application instead of a Java application?

The application I'm shipping is currently about 12 MB with all the .jar so adding Clojure doesn't seen to be too much of an issue.

My plan would be to have Clojure call Java APIs: my application is already divided in several independent jars.

If I understand correctly calling Clojure from Java is harder than calling Java code from Clojure which is why I'd basically rewrite all the UI (part of the UI, mixing Swing components and self-made BufferedImages needs to be rewritten anyway due to the rise of retina display), and do all the 'wiring' from Clojure.

So that's the problem I'm facing: is it realistic to ship a Clojure desktop app? (it certainly doesn't seem to be very widespread but then shipping plain Java desktop apps ain't that common either and I'm doing it anyway)

Technically, what would need to be done? (compared to shipping a Java app)

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