It's true that Java hello world will be faster than Clojure JVM hello world. That said, a big Java application with lots of classes to load, and lots of static

It's true that Java hello world will be faster than Clojure JVM hello world. That said, a big Java application with lots of classes to load, and lots of static initializers (which would approach the same number as what Clojure requires to be loaded and initialized) would take as much time as it does for Clojure. So when people say that part of the slow startup is Clojure's fault, they mean more that it is implemented in a way that the JVM isn't very fast at starting. But if you look at Clojure implemented on other runtimes, like ClojureScript, the startup times are much faster, because the NodeJS runtime is much faster to start and initialize everything than the JVM is. In effect, if the JVM improves startup times, so will Clojure JVM's startup times be improved. That's why I see this drastic difference between a Clojure hello world on Java 8 vs Java 14.