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Comment by prospero | Hacker News Reader

What about the JVM is such a downer?

The only downers I care about are stack traces in "Java" rather than Clojure and the lack of TCO in the JVM.

I think there's some work going on to address the former. The latter issue isn't really that bad unless you need to use trampoline, which I don't care for because it means the functions have to be written to know they'll be used in this way.

Regardless, Clojure is one of my favorite languages.

Nothing really. I think it is just a preference thing. If I don't have to install Java then that is one less thing to install I guess.

Even though OSX Mountain Lion makes it simple to install Java (click yes on first use), it's one less OS that comes with it preinstalled.

Also, the slower startup time of the JVM affects clojure apps and makes simple command line scripts in clojure less attractive

This is not exactly true. The JVM startup time is not what makes Clojure slow to load; it's the startup of Clojure itself.

    ~$ time clj test.clj 
    Hello world!
    
    real    0m1.337s
    user    0m1.309s
    sys     0m0.172s


    ~$ time java Test
    Hello world!
    real    0m0.142s
    user    0m0.116s
    sys     0m0.030s

You may want to look at the -XX:+TieredCompilation -Xbootclasspath flags. They reduced the clojure startup significantly for me.

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