Following up on the Haskell, OCaml, Python, ReScript, Ruby, Elixir, Java, Elm, Rust, and Racket benchmarks, I ran the same AoC 2025 Days 1–5 setup in Clojure.
Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM. It's known for its persistent data
structures, REPL-driven development, and strong concurrency primitives. For this benchmark,
models needed to write standalone scripts runnable via clj. The JVM startup cost is real —
one model got trapped in repeated slow clj invocations on a single part, ballooning its
wall-clock time — but the language itself posed no conceptual difficulty. No scaffolding was
provided.
The result: 9 of 10 models completed all 10 parts. One ejection on Day 1 Part 2.