Anything that uses the JVM will never (at least for a long time) achieve the startup time of cpython, cruby or node, less of ls and grep, so don't get your hope

Anything that uses the JVM will never (at least for a long time) achieve the startup time of cpython, cruby or node, less of ls and grep, so don't get your hopes up :) - that said, most of clojure's startup problems lie in clojure itself and not the JVM.