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Are there are performance comparisons of Clojure on JVM versus CLR? Or maybe someone who has used both with performance-sensitive code can give some anecdotal comments?
The performance of Clojure JVM is better than that of Clojure CLR. I don’t have explicit benchmarks to point to, but I have a lot of experience doing compilation and running tests in both environments and the difference is obvious.
There are several factors involved in the difference. Some are being worked on. Some are related to JVM vs CLR perf differences and hence beyond the means of the ClojureCLR developers to address.
(1) Compilation of Clojure code to the platform Intermediate Language.
At the most basic level, the IL generated is almost identical. However, design choices forced by some limitations of the Dynamic Language Runtime result in each function definition creating an extra class and function invocations to have an extra method call. Version 1.4 of ClojureCLR (coming soon) eliminates the use of the DLR for most code generation. (The DLR will still be used for CLR interop and polymorphic inline caching.) At this point, generated code will be substantially the same as the JVM version. Startup time has been reduced by 10% and simple benchmarks show 4-16% improvements over version 1.3. More details here.
(2) Startup time
Clojure JVM starts significantly faster than Clojure CLR. Most of this is traceable to the JVM being able to selectively load class files (versus the CLR loading entire assemblies) and differences in when JIT compilation occurs. However, if ClojureCLR is NGEN’d, startup times are really fast. More details here.
(3) JVM versus CLR performance
Some attention has been paid to making ClojureJVM work well with HotSpot compiler optimizations. I don’t have explicit proof, but I’m guessing that HotSpot just does a better job on things like inlining in compiled Clojure code versus the CLR JITter. It is fair to say that no attention has been paid to how to make ClojureCLR take better advantage of the CLR JITter.
The release of ClojureCLR 1.4 will provide a good opportunity for some benchmarking.