.04 is user time. The elapsed time was .12 - this is how long you have to wait. Still it's a fair point: 120ms is noticeable but not painful.

Right, I looked into the wrong place.

It's unclear what machine and JVM configuration they're using. Using the JVM 1.8 (java version "1.8.0_20") on a 2010 MBP (2.4GHz i5) I get ~190ms (180~200) for their program.

By comparison, on the same machine using an equivalent program

- Lua 5.2.3 takes 20ms

- CPython 2.7.5 takes 40~45ms

- MRI 2.0.0p481 and CPython 3.4.3 clock in at 55~60ms

- Pypy 2.5.0 takes 85~95ms

You are missing clojure start time which for me is over 1.5 seconds on top of the jvm start time.

I'm not missing anything, I'm saying the statement

> And the JVM has the slowest startup time of any runtime I've ever encountered.

looks completely correct in and of itself. Clojure's startup time can be blamed for making things worse (by a fairly significant bit), but the JVM is already, without Clojure, the slowest-starting runtime I have on my machine. And that's what pjmlp objected to.

I get 130ms on Windows 8.1, Core Duo 2.53 GHz with jdk1.8.0_40. And 120ms If I disable the JIT.

With a normal hard disk.

Maybe it does take a few ms more than Lua or Python, but hardly anything significant.

> Maybe it does take a few ms more than Lua or Python

Yeah, like 3 to 6 times longer.

> but hardly anything significant.

Well if 6x is not significant, surely Clojure's second start time is hardly significant.

I don't want to install Lua or Python just to test how long an Hello World takes, hence my "maybe".

Even if I am wrong, 6x here means 130ms, whereas Clojure time is in the order of seconds.

Big enough to warrant a few entries on their roadmap.

http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/%27Lean%27+Runtime

http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/02/25/clojure-bootst...