>should be faster due to static typing than Clojure
Uh, why? Are all object types known at runtime in Clojure? I bet they are. And this is exactly what Hotspot was designed to make fast [1].
Uh, why? Are all object types known at runtime in Clojure? I bet they are. And this is exactly what Hotspot was designed to make fast [1].
However the Clojure implementations on the site are still quite young, so some improvement may be possible.
[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
The Shootout probably wont show good results for this because it takes a little bit for Hotspot to get the most out of it. If you look at the Mandelbrot demo in Strongtalk it takes about 3 full runs to get the best speed.
How much work the code that they generate does. Clojure is mostly pure right? If you have, e.g. a btree and you change some nodes the old notes won't get deleted, a new tree will be created where some of the nodes point to the still valid old ones and some point to your changes. That's more work then just mutating the variables.