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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Start-up times are still an issue with Clojure on the JVM. For instance with Android I've found the initialization times to be pretty much a show-stopper for any application development.

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Clojure on the JVM is way worse than java...but the JVM only contributes to a tiny portion of that. The real problem is that every clojure process has to bootstrap the entire language and compile every library before it can begin executing.

I don't know anything about Clojure, but in modern Android development, Instant Run patch files mean installation isn't even done each change any more. Even then, you can avoid a lot of installation time by using an emulator on a fast development machine instead of a real device. For most of Android's life the emulator has been disgustingly slow, but for installation times, it has benefits. Meanwhile restoring from a snapshot instead of booting fresh each time, x86 emulator images, and Intel's virtualization engine mean the speed isn't so bad any more.

It has nothing to do with that and more to do with that last time I tried it the start-up times for an app was multiple seconds on top of base start times.

Given how often Android evicts apps that's something I'm not comfortable with shipping. Would love to use Clojure but it was definitely a show-stopper for us.

What did you use instead?

Stock Android/Kotlin.

Android doesn't run the JVM.

That's a lot different a context than web-application deployment, though.

That's mostly on clojure.core being so large and rebuilt each time by default isn't it ?

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