> The majority of the Clojure startup time is spent on initializing the Clojure runtime. That's correct but even without this startup time Clojure is significa

> The majority of the Clojure startup time is spent on initializing the Clojure runtime. That's correct but even without this startup time Clojure is significantly slower than other functional languages. Look at SBCL and Racket in http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... That doesn't mean that I don't like Clojure. I am even considering it for a business project. But Clojure is definitely unsuitable for small apps (shell scripts etc.) Btw the benchmark listing doesn't take LuaJIT into account. This JIT is the fastest I have ever encountered, way ahead of JVM regarding startup time.