Depending on what you're going for, you could use GraalVM.

It is ridiculously difficult to use native-image. The only one I know of to successfully pull this off in a broad wide-ranging program is the author of babashka, Michael Borkent. The man is a legend, and using his work I was able to get my program to run on Linux, but getting it to run Windows was a whole nother hurdle and I wasn't willing to continue. Keeping track of all of those jira issues and matching Clojure releases with native-image releases and getting all the configuration files right and writing the scripts that you need to write the configuration files, and then waiting 30 minutes for anything of value to compile, not really an ideal development cycle scenario.

tbh, it worked pretty easily under windows.

1. use vcvars64.bat, usually in ...\Community\Common7\Tools\vcvars64.bat or ...\Enterprise\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat

2. lein uberjar

3. Setup GraalVM: set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\GraalVM\graalvm-ce-java17-22.3.0

4. native-image --no-fallback -jar target\default+uberjar\clojuresque-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

(you have to tweak with the paths above, depending on your system.

The resulting executable isn't small, but it starts quickly and doesn't depend on anything on the system other than MS C-runtime redistributable.

Sure, sure, the base case is easy. I would be more impressed with an example that has datalevin or SQLite as a dependency, though. Also Cheshire and/or jetty. Real-world dependencies make it difficult.

Sure, but the real problem is you're tied to the JVM ecosystem of tooling to some extent

One persons problem is another persons… enormous stack of existing tooling. You’re not wrong, but the knife cuts both ways on that point.

Good. This is one step to stop the future from looking like that Internet Archive thing they did for their 25th anniversary: https://wayforward.archive.org/ia2046/.

End of an era