I'm not sure whether this belongs on StackOverflow or in the Clojure Google group. But the group seems to be busy discussing numeric improvements for Clojure 1.2, so I'll try here:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ has a number of performance benchmarks for various languages.

I noticed that Clojure was missing, so I made a Clojure version of the n-body problem.

The fastest code I was able to produce can be found here, and benchmarking it seems to be saying that for number crunching Clojure is

  • factor ~10 quicker than Python/Ruby/Perl
  • factor ~4 slower than C/Java/Scala/Ada
  • approximately on par with OCaml, Erlang and Go

I'm quite happy with that level of performance.

My question to the Clojure gurus is

  • Are there obvious improvements I have missed, either in terms of speed or in terms of code brevity or readability (without sacrificing speed)?
  • Do you consider this to be representative of Clojure performance vs Python/Ruby/Perl on one hand and Java/C on the other?

Update

More Clojure 1.1 benchmark programs for the shootout here, including the n-body problem.

performance clojure benchmarking
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