Why is the Clojure Hello World program so slow compared to Java and Python?

Question

Update

As suggested by many people, it looks like this was because of the fact that clojure code was first compiled and then executed. AOT compilation s

Answer 1

You're not measuring much here except for Clojure boot time. You're also running your program in such a way that you are measuring compilation time as well. If you want to see faster load times you'll need to ahead-of-time compile your code.

Having coded a bit in Python, I've found that Clojure is as a general rule much, much, much faster than Python and you can usually get a Clojure program to get within 2X-4X of the speed of pure Java.