It's not a strawman at all- many of us who run Clojure have had to switch to other langs for parts of our infrastructure that require faster start-up time. Think Lambda / "serverless" computing, etc

Agreed it doesn't help with static dependencies, which is why I didn't mention it ;)

It is a straw man - you're justifying your suggested solution by comparing it to something that is already considered bad in the area. That's exactly what a straw man is.

You're suggesting the answer to "we need better startup time" must be "we need the best startup time possible"? In that case, Go is also bad. Everything should be hand-rolled assembler.

Many of us who actually run Clojure in production have been bit by this, and Clojurescript has been fast enough to alleviate the issue. Not a straw man, a community meme.

With pkg [1][2] and nexe [3] you can package ClojureScript on Node.js applications as a static binary. Of course, Go would be better in terms of size/performance, so it's now a matter of making tradeoffs between relative size/performance and team productivity. But at least for teams using Clojure/ClojureScript, this gives you that an additional option, where none existed.

[1] https://github.com/zeit/pkg

[2] https://clojurescript.org/guides/native-executables

[3] https://github.com/nexe/nexe