[neilyio]

When you get into REPL-driven development, the JVM startup time (which is often under a second for me anyways) is a total non-issue. You don't continuously restart your program to see changes or run tests. You can refresh all your state instantly without exiting.

But before Babashka, that was indeed a barrier to using Clojure in shell scripts. Now we have it all!

[geokon]

Except in Babashka you can't use Java libraries.. Right?

I feel a good fraction of code will dip into Java libs at least a bit - so you're limited in what libraries you can use

I think the real solution is probably Graal native - though it's not part of the official toolbox/deps.edn

[amelius]

In Unix it is customary to invoke tools from the Bash shell or Bash scripts. That doesn't mix well with a separate REPL.

[neilyio]

I see your point here... I was addressing to the feedback loop during development time. Babashka works well for Clojure in a Unix tool pipeline.

It's also possible to compile your JVM Clojure program yourself to a binary with GraalVM for even better performance than Babashka and even faster startup.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Clojure and Common Lisp are the two cases where I’ve never felt the need to work in bash: most projects grow a library of utilities for development that aren’t limited by the stringly-typed nature of bash or zsh