Something I would like to see is Prolog/logic programming embedded in a general purpose programming language, rather than as a standalone system.
Racket and Perl 6 are the only small userbase languages in the last 8-10 years to amaze me with their feature sets and to make me want to learn them just for the sake of experiencing them.
I think you oversaw that core.logic is basically a minikanren (plus c-kanren, plus alpha-kanren) implementation in clojure instead of scheme; it even points to the papers and to The Reasoned Schemer for documentation and reference.
That is, saying that minikanren seems to be closer to the mark than core.logic is a little bit nonsensical (please read that in a good sense!)
You're right, although I think what I was actually wrong about was what minikanren is (probably by looking at examples in languages I was less familiar with).
I don't want to do logic programming in clojure (or whatever other language), I want to do logic programming in Prolog and drop it into my clojure project and have to do as little plumbing as possible.
The nearest analogy I can come up with is LINQ. In the examples in [1] the experience of the developer is closer to writing SQL in the middle of a C# or VB file, rather than having a good C# database query library.
Please note that Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). Although the emphasis has been on stability and efficiency improvements, some advances have been made in the concurrency department (react whenever) since then. And a project is now underway that will result in macros becoming first class citizens in Raku.
There is probably a logic programming system for your favorite language. MiniKanren might not be exactly what you want, but even then there's probably something Prologgy too.
> Something I would like to see is Prolog/logic programming embedded in a general purpose programming language, rather than as a standalone system.
That's super common, both as bridges to Prolog systems from other host languages and as implementations of Prolog semantics (or a subset like Datalog) as libraries in other host languages; also MiniKanren is available for many host languages.
Racket and Perl 6 are the only small userbase languages in the last 8-10 years to amaze me with their feature sets and to make me want to learn them just for the sake of experiencing them.