Is this a hobby project or are you aiming toward getting adoption? I will confess that I don't understand the point. If we accept the Church-Turing thesis then there's no reason that by the time you catch up to Clojure's performance on the JVM it will have been optimized beyond the measurement you made. The only real guarantee you can make is that you will have added an abstraction layer to Python.

While I definitely think this is a cool project, when I think about using it in production it strikes me as more Sisyphus than Prometheus.

First of all, it should be mentioned, that this is not an abstraction layer. Clojure-py functions are actual Python functions (not classes as they are on the JVM). This means that the speed of clojure-py is almost exactly the same as python code.

Secondly, there is some benifit to not having to worry about static typing in a dynamic language. Anyone want to explain how to read a binary file in Clojure? Here's a hint, it takes the use of FileInputStream, DataInputStream. In clojure-py it's as simple as (py/open "foo.bin" "r").

And thirdly, why are we writing a dynamic language on a static VM? Fast Clojure code on the JVM these days takes little hints. You have to tag parameters with ^Integer and ^Double to kick the compiler type inference into gear. None of this is required on a dynamic VM. In fact, it's completely pointless.

Ok, what's the use case? What is the benefit to this versus regular ol' Python? In what situations might I write clj-py assumine identical performance to Cpython or pypy, instead of just Python?

I agree that this is a really cool project and I plan on reading through the source when I have time strictly as a learning exercise, but I cannot think of a use case.

Consider the case of a person that prefers programming in Clojure to programming in Python... :)

I am such a person. That's why I program in Clojure -- yes, including a couple of Clojure repos at work (after gettin sign off from my boss). I also love Python. Best tool for the job and all that. Rewriting Clojure in Python is as absurd to me as rewriting JavaScript or Ruby in "pure Python". You get nothing meaningful except different syntax.

I agree, if you're into Python, use python. However, I find things like macros, protocols, and multimethods drastically reduce the amount of coding that has to be done to accomplish a certain task. But I'm biased there ;-)

Well, don't get me wrong, I love Clojure and have been writing more Clj than Py the last few weeks.

If nothing else lispreader.py will be useful for reading Clojure data in Python. Think communicating with nREPL and reading the forms that come back