Sure thing. I made it run for 4000 cycles twice. The first (cold) run took 2831.323 ms, and the warmed-up run took 2571.397 ms. About 10% faster.
Judging by the invocation noted at the bottom of http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=mande..., the comments about Java in the FAQ do not apply to the Clojure code. The benchmark seems to have been invoked straight from the command line.
- 2831.323 ms for what workload? The benchmarks game measurements are made at 3 different workloads; but the times that matter are those for the largest workload, in this case N=16,000. So please show the times for N=16,000.
- the benchmarks game measurements are made with output redirected to /dev/null
- both the clojure and java programs are invoked straight from the command line, and include start-up. The Help page provides additional "warmed" measurements for the fastest Java programs, for comparison - because sometimes the JVM startup costs are larger in the mind than they are when measured :-)
Well certainly, in a real-world program which runs for long periods analyzing tons of data, JVM startup costs and JIT costs amount to nothing, as they are paid in the first few seconds. But we are talking about short, synthetic benchmarks here.
I ran mandelbrot for 4000 cycles, just invoking the function which does the work twice and wrapping each call in Clojure's (time ...) form. This all happened in an AOT-compiled .class file, which guaranteed a cold start. For what it's worth, I didn't bother tuning the GC or any other JVM parameters — I suspect I could have made it run a bit faster by manipulating generation sizes.
Judging by the invocation noted at the bottom of http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=mande..., the comments about Java in the FAQ do not apply to the Clojure code. The benchmark seems to have been invoked straight from the command line.