The comment your replying to is about a JVM-less Clojure implemtation

Indeed! Babashka is such a cool project. SBCL save-image stand-alone command line apps start very quickly, instantly it seems, but still I think that Babashka scripts or apps even start faster.

GraalVM is based on the JVM, it consumes Java libraries...

Babashka programs run on sci, a Clojure interpreter written in Clojure. That interpreter is compiled with GraalVM to get quick startup time and single binary distribution. But passing on the sins of the father, so to say, here is like dismissing Lua becuase you don't like C libraries.

Providing libraries for babashka works over a language agnostic interface based on bencode-serialized data, and separate processes[1]. Indeed if you look at the pod registry there are pods writtenin Rust, Haskell, Go in addition to Clojure, not to mention the Python example in the pod tutorials.

[1] https://github.com/babashka/pods