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Simplistic idiomatic Clojure is much faster than JRuby, but often a bit slower than Java and Scala depending on how much you rely on reflection.

However, if you push it, Clojure can be as fast as anything else on the JVM; it's just a matter of how much time you spend profiling and optimizing. In many cases you can output the exact same bytecode in Clojure that you'd get from a several-times-more-verbose Java program.

An extreme example: http://meshy.org/2009/12/13/widefinder-2-with-clojure.html



$ time echo '(println "Hello, world!")' | clojure

Clojure 1.0.0-

user=> Hello, world!

nil

user=>

real 0m2.756s

user 0m1.040s

sys 0m0.140s

$ time echo 'print "Hello, world!"' | python

Hello, world!

real 0m0.018s

user 0m0.000s

sys 0m0.010s

Beware the horrible startup time for small programs.




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