I would love to use Clojure (it's probably the only language I would consider moving to right now) but the JVM just doesn't work for me. Clojure-native that offered all of Clojure and was realistic - there was one that indirectly used Gambit Scheme at one time, and an incomplete Python version - would be awesome. Clojure that requires you to use the current Java approaches to interfacing with C is not of interest.
I've felt that way about clojure native, but what makes a language is the ecosystem, and the JVM brings a fantastic ecosystem.
There really is no way to offer "all of clojure" as native because the ecosystem is part of what "all of clojure" offers.
I've long thought about ways of doing a "native" clojure, and have eventually come to the conclusion that it doesn't offer anything compelling.
If you want fast start up time and scripting, you can do that with node and clojurescript. Or Lumo or whatever else there is in that area.
Once running, the JVM is pretty performant in a lot of cases... Where it struggles are where all garbage collected languages struggle. If that's the pain point, you could probably bootstrap a scheme from Gambit or Chicken that did manual memory management...I struggle to imagine what that would look like in the end though. Lisp flavored C maybe.
People smarter than me have said that the Clojurescript compiler is an excellent starting point for making a compiler that emits other languages. It's over my head, but maybe it would be a worthwhile project to emit golang or something.
I believe some of the clojure-schemes that floated around briefly bootstrapped from clojurescript compiler to emit Gambit Scheme...
Without the libraries/ecosystem I don't think it would be worth it.
