Not really. Few if any platforms compete with the JVM on performance and observability (monitoring/management) and ecosystem. It's technologically head and shoulders above pretty much all other runtimes (e.g. BEAM has excellent observability, but loses big time on performance and ecosystem). Also, if you're OK with the JVM running at BEAM speeds, you can give it far less memory.
The JVM and .NET are presently about the same capability-wise, but Java is (or at least, is perceived as) much easier and cheaper to freely experiment with. Unless you need to use C# for some deep Windows integration, this makes Java the obvious choice for anyone without sunk costs in the .NET ecosystem.
It's an official dialect: https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr
I'm curious about this. How do you do it in practice? Doesn't it just crash with OutOfMemory errors when it runs out of memory?
I've been running a simple JVM web app on my own personal server with an allocated 128 MB of RAM and a lot of that is actually unused. You can do a lot with a heap of just 64 MB.
People aren't aware, but when running your average PHP app you need more than that with just a couple of requests done at the same time, whereas my JVM server can easily handle 1000 requests per second. Similarly Ruby or Python apps can be big resource hogs, especially when you end up setting up multiple parallel processes.
I was also surprised to find that compilation to "native" isn't necessarily efficient in terms of used memory. I've built a similar app in Haskell and the used memory ended up being higher and more unpredictable. If something like Go fares better, it's not because it is compiled to native.
All in all the JVM is actually quite efficient in terms of used memory, for a garbage collected language ;-)
This is untrue. The default configuration is just to do it very reluctantly, but this can be changed.