clj-aus #2: Jolt since September, and Clojure on the Wii

clj-aus is back for session two. It's online, and it starts at 7pm this time, so you can join from home after dinner. That's 4pm in Perth, 6pm in Brisbane, 6:30pm in Adelaide and 9pm in Auckland.

JOLT SINCE SEPTEMBER

In September we ran raylib under three native Clojures, and one of them was Jolt, which is Clojure on Chez Scheme. A lot has landed since. Jolt now talks to PostgreSQL and SQLite, serves Ring apps, runs reitit-core and clj-http-lite unmodified, reads and writes Transit and Fressian, and exports OpenTelemetry traces, all without a JVM. We'll take a quick tour of what you can build with it today.

CLOJURE ON THE WII

Then the main event. We got Clojure running on a Nintendo Wii. It has a 32-bit big-endian PowerPC, and Jolt had never produced code for a 32-bit or big-endian machine before. We'll walk through what it took, then play the games live:

• Balloon Pop: point at the TV and press A to pop balloons
• Star Catcher: hold the remote sideways and tilt it to steer
• Shake Race: shake the remote as hard as you can to run
• Super Mona: a 32-stage platformer, written in Clojure on Jolt

The first three take up to four players, with rumble. So far it all runs in the Dolphin emulator. If you've got a real Wii in a cupboard somewhere, you're exactly who we want to hear from.

The whole project goes open source live on the night. Come along and be there when it does, then take the guides home and try it yourself.

LIGHTNING TALKS

There's a lightning-talk slot, 5 to 10 minutes on anything you've built or learned in Clojure, ClojureScript, ClojureDart, Babashka, jank or Jolt. It doesn't need to be finished or polished, and first-time speakers get priority. Say so in the comments here, or open an issue at github.com/clj-aus/meetings, by Saturday 21 November.

FORMAT

Five minutes of hellos, about 45 minutes of Jolt and the Wii, then lightning talks and questions. We run on our own Jitsi server, so there's no time limit. If the questions keep going past 8:30, so do we.

WHO SHOULD COME

Anyone who writes Clojure, used to, or is curious. If you've never touched Clojure but grew up with a Wii, this is a good first one.
The joining link will be posted here the weekend before. The session is recorded and published afterwards.

More about clj-aus, and the archive of past sessions: https://clj-aus.github.io/

clj-aus is community-run and follows the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.