Optimizing Clojure: Leveraging Modern JVM for Performance

Clojure succeeded by delivering a profoundly simple computing model that changed how we manage state and complexity. Yet, over the last fifteen years, both our real-world production experience and the underlying JVM have evolved dramatically. This talk explores how we can leverage modern JVM capabilities to advance Clojure's core abstractions without compromising its core philosophy. We share concrete research improvements to core language features, including a provably better protocol implementation and a novel compiler approach to vars that yields major startup performance gains. From this foundation, we make a call for deeper research into a modernized compiler and runtime.