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Comment by BFay | Hacker News Reader

Cool, I wanted to use Clojure on the Raspberry Pi, but the startup time is very slow, due more to loading the core Clojure libraries than the JVM.

It makes writing a Clojure web server really impractical on the Pi. I considered using clojurescript for the server, but ended up just going back to node for my project.

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I wouldn't get too excited just yet. Just built this on my RPi2 without JIT and ran the hello world file in the example folder:

    ./examples/hello-world.pxi  24.33s user 0.40s system 99% cpu 24.797 total

There's something pretty wrong with that example. Times from my RPi2:

time ./pixie-vm ./examples/hello-world.pxi Hello, World!

real 0m1.167s user 0m1.160s sys 0m0.000s

That's a bummer on my end. I'll have to look into why later.

No clue what was different but I started from scratch and now get

    ./pixie-vm ./examples/hello-world.pxi  1.01s user 0.00s system 98% cpu 1.021 total

Sorry for the negative report.

Out of curiosity, why did startup time matter for a webserver? Webservers seem to be the canonical example of long running processes where startup time doesn't matter.

Also, why not clourescript on node? Seems like the best of both worlds.

Let's say you have a widget that you want to control via a web interface. A Pi is an easy way to interface between the web and lower level hardware (via GPIO). Startup time is the time from when you plug in power for your widget until you can control your widget from the web.

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