As an aside - I was trying to reduce -Xmx to improve HelloWorld startup (lol idk...) and Xmx smaller then 1024k and it couldn't start up with less then 1024k so there's that.

On my windows computer (also I barely know what I'm doing so probably even timing it wrong).

  [Mon Mar 09 03:22:31 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
  $ time a.exe
  Hello, world
  real    0m0.098s
  user    0m0.015s
  sys     0m0.015s
  [Mon Mar 09 03:22:34 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
  $ time java Hello
  Hello, world!

  real    0m0.285s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.031s

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...

With Haskell:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...

I suspect there are ways to make it faster (e.g. there's a nashorn runner that starts up appreciably faster than "proper" java), but the main use case for java is server-side programs that run for days or weeks between restarts, so it's optimized for that use case.

Unfortunately for the folks who still have to use Java desktop software written in Swing.

> time for x in $(seq 1 100); do ./helloworld.py ; done

    real    0m1.240s
    user    0m0.902s
    sys     0m0.343s

Java for comparison:

> time for x in $(seq 1 100); do java Hw; done

    real    0m4.952s
    user    0m4.051s
    sys     0m1.071s

     > java -version
     java version "1.7.0_72"
     Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_72-b14)
     Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.72-b04, mixed mode)

But for example one of the areas that Clojure has been doing well in is the enterprise big data space which is dominated by the JVM based Hadoop ecosystem. Likewise many companies feel comfortable bringing in Clojure because they can leverage their existing Java libraries.

My point was that getting rid of the JVM loses a lot of what made Clojure actually successful.

> Although parts of the language may be very close to Clojure (they are both lisps after all), language parity is not a design goal. We will take the features from Clojure or other languages that are suitable to our needs, and feel free to reject those that aren't. Therefore this should not be considered a "Clojure Dialect", but instead a "Clojure inspired lisp".

And I agree that seeing maybe Clojure 2.0 abandon backwards compatibility with Java < 9 would be nice.

Pixie is not officially connected to Clojure in any way.

The creator has been involved in Clojure's development, and is remixing parts he likes into a new language and platform. I would peg this more as a research project that the Clojure team could take some pointers from.