> My surface level understanding is that GCL is a big reason why 3rd party libraries are a huge pain to use in Clojurescript.
This isn't true.
What you might have heard is that the Google Closure Compiler with :advanced optimizations makes external libraries harder to use. This also isn't true if you use good tooling (shadow-cljs makes using npm libraries transparent and totally painless).
It is worth observing that :advanced optimizations result in a significant speed increase, but are considered too difficult to use in the JavaScript world. ClojureScript was designed from the start to be compiled in :advanced mode, so you get the benefits of an impressive whole-program optimizing compiler for free.
This isn't true.
What you might have heard is that the Google Closure Compiler with :advanced optimizations makes external libraries harder to use. This also isn't true if you use good tooling (shadow-cljs makes using npm libraries transparent and totally painless).
It is worth observing that :advanced optimizations result in a significant speed increase, but are considered too difficult to use in the JavaScript world. ClojureScript was designed from the start to be compiled in :advanced mode, so you get the benefits of an impressive whole-program optimizing compiler for free.