Startup time is something of a red herring for me, kind of like &quot;give me a single EXE or your language is useless&quot; used to be in the Common Lisp world. I don&#x27;t encounter this problem in practical use. But then, I don&#x27;t use Clojure to write scripts that I then run hundreds of times from the shell (but why would you want to do that, rather than write a program that does what is needed to hundreds of files at once?).