When people complain about JVM, very often it turns out that they hate the first letter in it. I felt the same, for very long time I ignored Clojure because I hated "Java" part of JVM. It turns out - JVM in fact is a pretty solid piece of tech. And not once I had to deal with Java code since I started writing Clojure. Don't hate JVM because you don't like Java. Bashing on Java might be well reasoned, but hating JVM (most of the time) is completely baseless.