Super long startup times and large binary size are what turned me off. This is clojure specifically not jvm specific. I find the JVM to be fine, but when I looked for another lisp I did want one that was compiled just because it was easier to distribute my programs.

You can compile it to a native binary, then you get super fast startup times and small-ish binary sizes.

I invite you to try it. Put together a modest CLI that does SQLite, some network calls, and unzips files. ( https://github.com/djhaskin987/zinc ). Using native-image with any reasonable set of dependencies like this is *horrendous*. Just because you can doesn't mean it's tractable. I spent 10% of my time writing the tool and 90% of it trying to get it to compile. Absolutely the worst experience trying to get something to build in my life, and I'm a devops engineer. Building and shipping code is my thing.

Ya, I'm not going to disagree, it's not the nicest build pipeline.

That said, you can figure it out normally.

Using native dependencies will always be the hardest. I'd recommend first trying to use graalvm friendly libraries, and if not, libraries that are pure Java and don't have native dependencies.

For SQLite for example, you have to include the SQLite C driver, and that's where it gets a bit complicated.

See here for a demo build that includes SQLite: https://github.com/ericdallo/sqlite-graalvm-sample/tree/mast...

The most friendly way is to rely on this: https://github.com/clj-easy

It lists Clojure native image friendly libraries you can use. And it also includes some pre-configured dependencies you can depend on that will bring the correct build config.

Then just pretend like there are no other libraries yet for this "new" language. Or learn about the native image process more deeply and contribute to the effort to add easier support for more libraries.

I love Clojure but the JVM is admittedly resource hungry.

I haven't found that to be an issue. For small programs there's also babashka.