Sure, but of course if you want raw speed you would write assembly. Most people move up the food chain to C to get some basic level of correctness. I think the

Sure, but of course if you want raw speed you would write assembly. Most people move up the food chain to C to get some basic level of correctness. I think the history of production oriented PLs has revolved around balancing correctness/performance. And it's always a question of diminishing return (I've written enough C/C++/Objective-C++ to know this). Every sizeable application I've written in a lower level language eventually approaches some kind of wacky manual memory management scheme to preserve performance w/o sacrificing correctness. I think Clojure's solution is a step in the right direction. But no, if I was writing a real-time system with extremely limited memory constraints I would not write in the Clojure. But I don't think that's what this thread is about.