Clojure is almost as fast as C (with some help)
Summary
A hands-on comparison of Clojure and C performance using a vectorized approach via Project Panama’s Vector API. The author demonstrates that with static constants, macros for inlining, and a modern JVM, Clojure can approach C-scale performance on a hot loop, reporting around 0.86 ms vs 0.70 ms per frame and ~370 FPS on an M3 MacBook, with GPU becoming the bottleneck. The piece also discusses memory behavior and non-idiomatic hot-path code to avoid GC pauses.