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Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

'fastest starting Clojure REPL'... which is still slow compared to alternatives.

Serious question: Why are you such a hater?

Every time Clojure comes up I can rely on you to appear and attack something about it (but never the core merits of the language, as far as I can recall.)

Unfortunately, Node.js and V8 seem to be about 2.5X slower than JavaScriptCore for bootstrapped ClojureScript. I haven't found a way around it. I also don't mean to trick anyone and this is explained in the post.

To me 'fast' means more than startup time. The headline is just clickbait.

The time you are reporting is also not that 'fast'. Other tools start in a fraction of that time.

sbcl isn't Clojure, is it? Or am I mistaken? I don't see the article or its title comparing it to repls in general.

Edit: original comment mentioned sbcl and included sbcl repl start-up time.

Better title would be:

'less slowest starting Clojure REPL of three'

Mentioning 'fastest' at a time of 3GHZ multicore machines with SSD and a duration of 0.1 seconds is just absurd. That's >100 million instructions just to start a language prompt and evaluating a symbol to itself. The Java version is even more absurd with around 1 billion instructions just to get a REPL...

A shell on a 1 MIPS DEC VAX 11/780 started faster, while the machine had a hundred users.

What tools? What are you comparing it to?

Basically any self respecting scripting language starts at a fraction of the time of the 'world fastest Clojure REPL'.

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