Hi, author of jaque here. I've been working on some other things for a little while, but I'll be getting back to jaque soon. It's quite out of date and needs to be brought up to 1.0 and cleaned up a bit before I start grousing about the stack issues I was running into on the mailing list, but when I last was working on it I was running into issues with Graal when trying to increase the java stack size. Deep but bounded head recursion is quite common in nock, and I seem to recall I needed about 8 megs of stack space (I just passed -Xss 8m or something on the command line) and Graal slowed waaaay down. That's where I left it.
Truffle tech lead here. Happy to hear you are not giving up :-) Do you mind if I include your language on the experiments list?
BTW.: I'd recommend upgrading one Truffle release at a time. So it should always continue to compile. Just fix the deprecation warnings and continue with the next version until you reached the last version. We always keep deprecations for at least one version before we remove/break APIs.
Definitely not dead -- it got stalled for a while because Urbit tends to use deep stacks and both Graal and the JVM seem to favor shallow ones. The author (not me) came up with a "meta-stack" design that may mitigate this issue and will go back and try it soon.
But the performance seen on a trivial Ackerman function was very good -- Nock via Graal got close to C performance. That's impressive for what's basically a Lisp.
https://github.com/frodwith/jaque is the project though, which is an implementation of the Nock VM from Urbit