AOT compiling

Given a jank Leiningen project, you can ahead of time (AOT) compile all of your code and dependencies to an executable using this command.

lein compile

Your executable will be named based on your current project and can be found within target/debug/<project name> by default. When you invoke your executable, your -main function will be called.

Building for release

By default, lein compile will build you a debug executable with fewer optimizations enabled. To get a release executable, you can enable the release profile.

lein with-profile +release compile

AOT runtime selection

By default, AOT compilation will target jank’s static runtime. This means that the compiled binary will not link to Clang/LLVM and all of its functionality will be baked in. Since Clang/LLVM is not linked in, JIT compilation is not possible at runtime. Calling something like eval will throw. This is very similar to a Graal native image.

If you need to be able to JIT compile code from your AOT compiled binary, you’ll need to enable the dynamic runtime. From jank’s command line, you can use --runtime dynamic, but you can also just set this in your Leiningen project.

:profiles {:release {:jank {:runtime :dynamic}}}