Speaking of SBCL and Clojure, I have used Stumpwm and the Nyxt browser for a while and they both seem to run very well; I wonder if CLJ has any nice desktop applications that show off how it runs.
To be fair, clojure was designed with long lived servers in mind, so the "JVM takes ages to start and load the class path" tradeoff makes sense. A downside is that any GUI built in clojure will either has to jump through some AOT compilation hoops (graalvm, etc), or accept being slow as hell to boot.
This alone has been enough to dissuade me to write anything with a UI in clojure. Maybe the space has changed since last time I tried, though.