The borrow checker comes with different trade-offs though, which I personally find, for many applications, the immutable data-structure + atomic references with

The borrow checker comes with different trade-offs though, which I personally find, for many applications, the immutable data-structure + atomic references with GC route (or values over time semantics) is a better fit. The way you are forced to model things so that the borrow checker can successfully validate your code can often be frustrating, and it also comes at the cost of slow compile times and interactive programming, which Clojure is kind of a champion at, so I'm not sure it would be a good fit to add a borrow checker to it. I love the borrow checker for manually managed memory though, and for programs that need that kind of performance and tight memory usage, it is great. I've been following along the development of Carp because of that and my preference of Lisps: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp