I'm not surprised, but it hardly seems like a fair comparison to look at a language with deliberately simple base concepts tailored for the jvm to a couple of l

I'm not surprised, but it hardly seems like a fair comparison to look at a language with deliberately simple base concepts tailored for the jvm to a couple of languages attempting to implement a set of concepts which are not always a natural fit to the jvm. Just trying to marry two languages subtly different inheritance models can be tricky, and it's those areas that Clojure so neatly avoids. The bootstrapping point is interesting, I would like more of the language I work on to be implemented in itself rather than Java, but since the bulk of the runtime implementation is method lookup and other invokeDynamic stuff it would all start to get a little recursive, and I would want to take a very careful look at performance.