Clojure is almost as fast as C (with some help)

I have a stress test written in C: 100,000 cubes flying around in space. The CPU rebuilds every cube’s 4x4 transform matrix on every frame and sends all of them to the GPU. That is around 900,000 sine evaluations and 6 MB of matrix data per frame, and after that the GPU still has to draw 3.6 million triangles. So the frame is half CPU work, half GPU work. I ported it to Clojure and wanted to see how close I could get to the C version’s FPS. I should say up front that I did not do the optimization work alone: I paired with Claude Code on it, and most of the digging in this post (the benchmarks, the JIT logs, the failed attempts) comes from that session. ...

June 11, 2026

I made a multiplayer shooter game in Lisp

Developing a multiplayer third-person shooter game as a solo developer is a journey filled with challenges and rewards. I embarked on this adventure to create Wizard Masters, a web-based multiplayer game where players battle as mages wielding elemental spells. Built using Clojure, a Lisp dialect, this project pushed the boundaries of web game development and my own skills as a programmer. Here’s how it went. In Wizard Masters, players can choose from six elemental spells—fire, toxic, ice, lightning, and earth—and compete in two modes: solo and team deathmatch. I published the game on CrazyGames to reach a broader audience. However, its multiplayer nature demanded a large player base, which was a constant challenge. ...

January 22, 2025