Clojure vs. Java vs. WebAssembly vs. distcc Comparison Chart

Clojure is a robust, practical, and fast programming language with a set of useful features that together form a simple, coherent, and powerful tool. Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic, every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When a mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system.

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. The Wasm stack machine is designed to be encoded in a size- and load-time-efficient binary format. WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms. WebAssembly describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment that may even be implemented inside existing JavaScript virtual machines. When embedded in the web, WebAssembly will enforce the same-origin and permissions security policies of the browser. WebAssembly is designed to be pretty-printed in a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, and writing programs by hand. The textual format will be used when viewing the source of Wasm modules on the web.