Right, but the problem is that many programs do a lot more work when they start up than Hello, World. The Clojure runtime in particular does quite a lot at startup.

I don't like how this issue is constantly dismissed out of hand. It very obviously is actually a massive glaring issue which severely limits what clojure can reasonably be used for. Nobody would ever accept a 1 second startup time for CLI applications that we use all the time like git, kubectl, npm, docker, etc.

npm, docker, kubectl honestly, you are splitting hairs. I plan to run a process for hours, I think 40 ms delays are something I can live with.

git- I take more time to write the commit message to worry about 40 ms.

I mean sure optimise code to run it fast. But its not something that a human notices.

40ms? Clojure Hello World startup time is like 600ms and up. Yes sometimes you run npm and kubectl for hours but most of my usage is just running individual commands that take less than a second.