@ben.sless I have not tested those things. I only have the impression that Graal makes things fast. However, building with Graal does not seem to be trivial, so I may revert to Java
Building with a Native Image does significantly reduce start up time, however, the generated binary, by the Community Edition at least, performs worse than a JVM run would after the JIT has warmed up, so you need to consider the run time of the application itself. If it's under a few seconds a native image would probably be better. From minutes upwards a JVM would be better. Building a native image used to be harder but the Clojure community has figured out the big parts, so unless you're doing something weird or radical, it should be simple. Maybe just a bit resource intensive.