How would you define minimal startup time? Have you tested how much you can cut from startup time by using direct linking, AOT, removing metadata, etc?

@UK0810AQ2 I have not tested those things. I only have the impression that Graal makes things fast. However, building with Graal does not seem to be trivial, so I may revert to Java

Building with a Native Image does significantly reduce start up time, however, the generated binary, by the Community Edition at least, performs worse than a JVM run would after the JIT has warmed up, so you need to consider the run time of the application itself. If it's under a few seconds a native image would probably be better. From minutes upwards a JVM would be better. Building a native image used to be harder but the Clojure community has figured out the big parts, so unless you're doing something weird or radical, it should be simple. Maybe just a bit resource intensive.

But even using clojure itself and compiling it via graalvm might be a good way. Depending on the tasks you need to do (and libraries you want to use), using clj+ graalvm might give you lower footprint and probably better performance if it's important for you. But at a cost of rather slow build times, as native-image compilation is waaay slow. What's nice about babashka is that it already comes in natively-compiled form.

Ahh, cool, I will see if babashka will meet my needs, thanks!

check this thread from yesterday, started by lukasz 🙂 https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/CLX41ASCS/p1618416923161500

@U06BQ07JS you may want to check https://github.com/FieryCod/holy-lambda

It supports both java runtime and native one. This month I'm adding support for interceptor chain & GraalVM EE. Docs are lacking tbh, but @U017Y2J9F0W is working on it. 🙂

You can find examples in /examples folder. If you need some help with starting out then let me know :)