I'd agree that the JVM itself isn't so bad in terms of startup time. However, the last time I compared Clojure and Scala, Clojure took significantly longer to s

I'd agree that the JVM itself isn't so bad in terms of startup time. However, the last time I compared Clojure and Scala, Clojure took significantly longer to start up (even though what I was doing in Clojure was nothing compared to all the libraries I was pulling in with Scala!) Edit: I should add that there's a Perl 6 JVM backend. While it's not as up-to-date as the default MoarVM, it could also be ready "for Christmas" :)