nREPL Forever

Last week I announced Port, a small prepl client for Emacs. That post focused on Port itself, but writing it left me with the itch to do a follow-up on the bigger picture, because the socket REPL / prepl story is one I’ve been meaning to write up for years.If you’ve been around Clojure long enough, you remember the chatter. Socket REPL landed in Clojure 1.8 (January 2016), prepl in Clojure 1.10 (December 2018), and for a couple of years there was a steady stream of posts, tweets, and Slack threads to the effect of “this is what we should be building tools on. nREPL is on the way out.” Some serious people put their weight behind that idea, and some of them went and built tools to prove it.Now it’s 2026 and we can take stock.What the “hopeful” era looked likeThe pitch was good. Socket REPL is just the Clojure REPL exposed on a TCP port. prepl wraps it with a structured printer so the bytes coming back are EDN-tagged maps (:ret, :out, :err, :tap) instead of a human-readable prompt. Both…