Yes, unfortunately Clojure startup performance problems are home-grown and cannot be blamed on the JVM. On the other hand, once a Clojure repl is running, you can keep adding things without recompiling or even losing state, which can be a huge performance advantage, assuming that OP's troubles are related to dev xp.
Well talking about dev xp, I like to follow the Unix tradition, where one can make many tools, and run them from the commandline, combine them in scripts, etc. But obviously this only works if startup is on the order of milliseconds, not seconds. NodeJS lets us do this, so I was wondering why not Clojure/Java.
Anyway, I'm still curious how much faster running an AOT compiler on Clojure would be.
You could use a long-running JVM for these tools if there's a compelling use-case? Not ideal but if it lets you write tools in the language of your choice it may be worth it.
