Yeah, without middleware it works, but it has just some basic eval functionality.
A bit more things can be implemented to work without middleware, if needed (in the early days CIDER was just evaluating hardcoded clojure forms that did some of the ops that were transferred to middleware). That was limiting in many ways, but it gets the basic things done.
I agree that self-hosted nREPL server would be something ideal, and this was a big part of the reason I volunteered to work on the nREPl transition out of clojure-contrib. Now it’s perfectly possible for someone to make this happen.
And, of course, if people are willing to just add orchard
to their projects, the fallback mode would be much simpler than it was before.
This one is not well suited to decoding streams, like from the network.
There's only one I've found that does that, and it can't handle negative numbers.