Don't need AOT compilation; if you want performance, just stick with regular Clojure on the JVM.
I'd love to just see a small general-purpose interpreted Clojure (quick start up, small memory footprint, easy access to C libs), even if it lacked concurrency features.
There's the abandoned ClojureC project (https://github.com/schani/clojurec). There's also JVM-to-native compilers like gcj or ExcelsiorJet.
But at the moment, it doesn't seem like there's an established way to do all that.
* literal syntax for maps, vectors, sets, and regexes
* keywords
* clear separation of functional constructs (`for`, `map`, etc.) vs side-effecting ones (`do`, `doall`, `when`).
* large standard library of built-in functions, with overall fairly nice naming of things.
I've looked at Scheme, but it appears to be missing those things. I think some of them may be provided by srfi's, but upon a quick reading I couldn't make much sense of how to include and use them.