Ok this is excellent stuff.

Meh. ClojureScript is just as leaky as Clojure. Clojure brings all the XML pain of Java dependencies and slow start times, ClojureScript gets callback hell. They're fantastic languages but I couldn't help but wonder if there were a better VM to base them on.

What XML pain are you referring to? It's not something I've had to deal with in ~3-4 years of professional Clojure work

The slow start times are meaningless for long lived servers, which Clojure is best suited for. For fast startup time there is now Babashka which is great for many tasks, and GraalVM as another option.

Where the hell do you see XML in java development anymore, let alone in Clojure?

Presumably in Maven POM files for Java

> ClojureScript is just as leaky as Clojure

By leaky, I assume you are refering to the interop with the host platform. Overall, this seems like a benefit, simply for having access to many more libraries than would otherwise exist in Clojure(script).

> Clojure brings all the XML pain of Java dependencies

Do you mean pom.xml?

> better VM

The JVM seems extremely powerful with regards to performance and memory management, with 20+ years of backwards compatibility (mostly), and improvements still being made with GC and JIT.

> Clojure brings all the XML pain of Java dependencies

You don't have to use pom.xml for Clojure projects. The default, included-with-the-clojure-cli support to define your dependencies in deps.edn makes dependency management extremely simple

  ;deps.edn
  {:deps {org.postgresql/postgresql {:mvn/version "42.4.0"}}}

and React brings all the XML pain into HTML templates.

And Reagent removes all that pain in ClojureScript https://reagent-project.github.io/