Sure it's a disadvantage, but the way you say it makes it sound like it results in a terribly slow development experience where you're constantly waiting for it

Sure it's a disadvantage, but the way you say it makes it sound like it results in a terribly slow development experience where you're constantly waiting for it to start. The truth is, the development experience actually gives you much faster feedback with almost no waiting time as compared to the majority of other languages. That means the impact of the slow startup isn't really felt. I think where slow startup is a bigger issue is actually for certain production use cases, like CLIs, or serverless settings. There it would be awesome if Clojure JVM also started in sub-millisecond, and we didn't have to change to Clojure interpreted like babashka, or Clojure GraalVM native compilation.