About a year ago I got a phone call asking if I wanted to join another team at DRW. The team supports a (primarily) Java application, but the performance requirements would also allow it to be written in a higher level language. I'd been writing Clojure (basically) full-time at that point - so my response was simple: I'd love to join, but I'm going to want to do future development using Clojure.A year later we still have plenty of Java, but the vast majority of the new code I add is Clojure. One of the big reasons I'm able to use Clojure so freely is the seamless interop with Java.Execute Cloj...

If this isn’t a Zawinski quote, it should be.I have avoided the JVM my entire life. I am presently confronted with problems which fit in the JVM; JVM libraries, concurrency, giant data: all that good stuff. Rather than doing something insane like learning Java, I figured I’d learn me some Clojure. Why not? It’s got everything I need: JVM guts, lispy goodness; what is not to love?Well, as it turns out, one enormous, gaping lacuna is Clojure’s numerics performance. Let’s say you want to do something simple, like sum up 3 million numbers in a vector. I do shit l...