The performance non-goal is there to lower expectations compared to compiled Clojure. Babashka's author (me) does try to make it as fast as possible within the constraints it's implemented in.

That's true, but in my poor man tests, Babashka was in the ballpark of Python for me.

I was surprised when I realized I had overlooked the performance non-goal considering how fast it has been in my limited experience.

Ya, it even supports multi-core programming, so I bet for some use case it can outperform Python by parallelizing.

Ah. You are correct.