That makes sense that the potential for performance improvements is greater, I'm just a bit skeptical it can actually "consistently beat clojure" in anything except for micro-benchmarks. It's mentioned in that article that jank uses a pretty basic GC while the JVM/Graal contains multiple state-of-the-art GCs tailored to different use cases. It's been shown many times that the JVM or Graal's JIT compiler have better peak performance over a long duration than compiled programs. This simply comes down to the fact that there are a host of specialized optimization strategies only possible when compilation can happen during runtime.