While Java might not be as expressive as Clojure, you definitely take an even harder penalty to performance when using it over using Java. And you can gain some

While Java might not be as expressive as Clojure, you definitely take an even harder penalty to performance when using it over using Java. And you can gain some pretty strong benefits of using pure Java these days, what with Java 8 having lambdas, streams (parallel and synchronous), and all the wonderful libraries out there that help with concurrency. (RxJava, quasar, etc.) Among other things, such as a very nice wrapper over the OpenGL library. (LWJGL is utterly fantastic) You do lose a nice matrix library (glm) though. Of course, Clojure has wonderful concurrency as well, so you can ameliorate the cost of using Clojure by spinning up more threads. However, games are a tricky thing to parallelize, from what I know. Especially as the only place you can actually make OpenGL calls is from the thread a program is started from. I wouldn't recommend Ocaml for games though. Use Haskell or Go instead. Ocaml might be speedy, but it has a GIL, a la Python or Ruby. Also as far as I've found, there are basically no bindings libraries out there for opening windows or making OpenGL calls. And I might be misremembering, but the libraries that did allow you to use OpenGL used 1.x or 2.x versions, meaning you can't use a modern pipeline.