This high startup time in Clojure is a side-effect of the JVM. If you have a hello world program that does nothing it is indeed fast. If you are running Clojur

This high startup time in Clojure is a side-effect of the JVM. If you have a hello world program that does nothing it is indeed fast. If you are running Clojure you need to run at least clojure.core. Loading that is handled - surprise - by the JVM. As would be expected, if you run other implementations (like Dalvik), this can change dramatically (for worse, usually). So it is correct that loading the JVM itself is not what's taking most of the time. But loading take so much time because of the JVM. https://blog.ndk.io/clojure-bootstrapping.html https://blog.ndk.io/clojure-bootstrapping.html