I have yet to have a good experience with any JVM based app on the desktop with or without Clojure. Take a look at something like in IntelliJ as an example. It doesn't have a Clojure runtime, and it takes forever to start using gigs of memory. Like you said, it makes Electron apps look lean. I ended up switching to using VSCode because it just runs a lot better and uses less memory. And when it comes to Clojure specifically, ultimately it doesn't really matter whether the slowdown is JVM or Clojure specific. This problem has existed for around a decade now, I'm not expecting that it'll be addressed in the foreseeable future.
And yeah, Jolt solved this problem for me completely. Startup is fast, you get a single binary, and it runs anywhere Chez Scheme runs which is mac, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS. The best part is that you can use FFI to access native ecosystem as easily as Python.
There's also some fun Burin's been working on porting OpenLdk to Jolt https://github.com/jlt-commons/jolt-openldk
It might make it possible to translate Java bytecode to Jolt, and then link it into the binary similarly to native libs as a statically linked fasl. That way there might not even be much of a runtime cost.
And yeah, Jolt solved this problem for me completely. Startup is fast, you get a single binary, and it runs anywhere Chez Scheme runs which is mac, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS. The best part is that you can use FFI to access native ecosystem as easily as Python.
There's also some fun Burin's been working on porting OpenLdk to Jolt https://github.com/jlt-commons/jolt-openldk
It might make it possible to translate Java bytecode to Jolt, and then link it into the binary similarly to native libs as a statically linked fasl. That way there might not even be much of a runtime cost.