Anecdotally, the JVM is exactly why I never gave Clojure a shot, despite being otherwise immensely interested.

I remember reading about Jank a while back on HN and got excited for it. Though I wonder if it’ll be too late to recapture my interest by the time it’s ready. Hopefully not.

There is also Janet. Not quite Clojure, but heavily inspired and a nice language. And it has a pretty small, mostly ANSI C implementation, easy and fast to compile anywhere I tried, and can be embedded in applications with no LLVM dependency.