What about common lisp

What I suppressed was all the goodies my .sbclrc normally loads. So on that particular point it’s apples to apples in that neither clojure nor sbcl is using any “user content”, it’s just the base systems.

But yes, as I said, there are ways to cut down the amount of work each system is using. Since I never bother to start clojure via anything but lein, that’s how I did the example. [Correction, I thought I said it in my originally, but apparently I didn’t. I meant to say that both clojure and sbcl have ways to cut down the size of the system being startted].

I wasn’t really striving for apples to apples or pears to oranges or anything else. I was just showing that sbcl can be pretty lean and mean relative to jvm systems. In neither case was I attempting to optimize them. I was attempting to frame the discussion with a different perspective since it seemed to me the person I was responding to was framing the sbcl images as being somewhat unwieldy, and without chopping anything out of the image with the system build tool, it really isn’t that unwieldy, in my opinion.

The whole discussion is kind of funny to me. In 1986 when a 16 megabyte memory machine to run lisp was considered a major system, people complained about the slow startup time of lisp. Fast forward and now it seems like nothing, while at the same time people point fingers at java systems for startup time (so… not too many command line tools in java). In another 20 years no doubt we’ll laugh at how we felt about jvm startups.

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