Did you read the article? The majority of the Clojure startup time is spent on initializing the Clojure runtime.
"spends 95% of the startup-time loading the clojure.core namespace (the clojure.lang.RT class in particular) and filling out all the metadata/docstrings etc for the methods. This process stresses the GC quite a bit, some 130k objects are allocated and 90k free-d during multiple invokes of the GC (3-6 times), the building up of meta data is one big source of this massive object churn."
That doesn't mean that I don't like Clojure. I am even considering it for a business project. But Clojure is definitely unsuitable for small apps (shell scripts etc.)
Btw the benchmark listing doesn't take LuaJIT into account. This JIT is the fastest I have ever encountered, way ahead of JVM regarding startup time.
"spends 95% of the startup-time loading the clojure.core namespace (the clojure.lang.RT class in particular) and filling out all the metadata/docstrings etc for the methods. This process stresses the GC quite a bit, some 130k objects are allocated and 90k free-d during multiple invokes of the GC (3-6 times), the building up of meta data is one big source of this massive object churn."