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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

This gist narrowly predates Clojure GraalVM tooling that enables eg Babashka and Clojure usage in cloud FaaS with low cold start latency. And quick startup CLI tools like clj-kondo (a Clojure linter).

It seems there's some WebAssembly related things cooking GraalVM, currently just support for running wasm binaries but will be be interesting to see if eventually we get support for targeting WebAssembly (if WebAssembly one day gets good GC support).

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The decision to make Clojure JVM based and so slow to startup has slowed it's adoption to a much more significant level than anyone in the Clojure community is willing to accept.

is slow startup really such a big issue for the use cases that clojure aims to address?

I find most web server applications do not require fast startup times. its only recently with the advent of serverless that it is a potential problem.

And for desktop applications, the jvm platform itself is the bigger friction, rather than slow startup times. People just didn't prefer the non-nativeness of the jvm for some reason.

Oh, we know the reason. It is because UI looked ugly and the latency was high.

I think the lowish % of people using GraalVM, Babashka and ClojureScript-on-Node and lack of other supporting evidence make this theory dubious.

And yet, the percentage of Java programmers using clojure is less than 1%. Looked at another way, how many applications need the fast startup time, and why can’t they be run in a daemon?

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