First of all, JVM runs perfectly fine on a local machine and in many cases it can even beat C for raw performance thanks to its JIT. It has a heavier memory footprint, but that's not a huge issue for a lot of use cases. However, it's possible to run Clojure without the JVM nowadays. Babashka which is a native binary compiled with GraalVM and ClojureScript that targets Js runtimes. There is also Janet which is a Clojure inspired language that's tiny and embedable.