Actually the JVM is one of the reasons I would recommend clojure. It's a fine piece of engineering; much more solid than most VMs out there. Lots of tools for p

Actually the JVM is one of the reasons I would recommend clojure. It's a fine piece of engineering; much more solid than most VMs out there. Lots of tools for perf/monitoring/debugging. Why would you require an existing C lib? These days you have lots of JVM apps doing heavy lifting: from bigdata stuff (hadoop, presto, kafka, others) to webapp stuff (undertow, check techempower benchmarks). For those special cases you can wrap a C lib with FFI, but in my 10+ years of JVM experience I only needed to do it once, and it was because I was streaming video on a jnlp (java swing/java web start) app which worked remarkably well, considering I supported windows,linux and mac.