Clojure succeeded by delivering a profoundly simple computing model that changed how we manage state and complexity. Yet, over the last fifteen years, both our real-world production experience and the underlying JVM have evolved dramatically. This talk explores how we can leverage modern JVM capabilities to advance Clojure's core abstractions without compromising its core philosophy.

We share concrete research improvements to core language features, including a provably better protocol implementation and a novel compiler approach to vars that yields major startup performance gains. From this foundation, we make a call for deeper research into a modernized compiler and runtime.

Chris Nuernberger

"Chris attended the University of Colorado at Boulder earning a BS in computer science. Since then, his technical excellence has driven the development of many industry-leading products. Startups love him: with Anark, he brought advanced computer graphics and designer-developer interactions to the web. At SRC he deployed new lossless compression algorithms for GIS systems. At NVIDIA, he led an international team to develop the powerful and popular PhysX debugger. And, in recent years he has focused on applying neural networks and other data-intensive techniques to stubborn business problems, leaving a trail of happy customers in his wake. He has the distinction of both releasing software on CD-ROM, and managing cloud-native machine learning systems with high throughput and availability. Outside of work Chris enjoys his family, rock climbing, and pushing computers to perform beyond their limits."