Did you not read the article? Quote: "What we can see is that Java itself accounts for 0.35s of the startup time, but unfortunately Clojure adds another second(!) on top of that."

So no, it can not be mostly attributed to JVM.

Also, JVM in a low death spiral? What gives you that impression, the growing number of languages that target it? The fact that new versions continue to receive improvements, such as better support for dynamic languages in v. 7?

For me the more obvious comparison would be with other Lisps. Which, back in the dim past when I was using 'em, were often damn fast.

But as fogus said, speed is only one piece of the puzzle. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223562

How so?

In most enterprises, regardless what we think about the JVM, it is still quite healthy.

It's not all gloom and doom though; Attila Szegedi is at Oracle now, working on Nashorn - something exciting for Java 8.

The recent lawsuit kind of highlights that. Google is riding on years of development and refinement of Java IDEs and on mountains of available open-source libraries. They jump-started an Android community from zero by building an alternative VM for targeting Java source code, while giving the finger to Sun/Oracle and their licensing.

And I don't think they are so stupid as to not realize this.

The problem I see with Oracle is that if they push too much the community, companies might abandon it the same way they did with Delphi when Borland did too many mistakes. On the other hand, I can speak from my experience in the enterprise world, corporations love Oracle.