Comment by eigenhombre

That doesn't seem that bad to me for a Lisp.

Common Lisp / SBCL equivalent for me is 41MB.

Clojure überjar size for the same is 4.6MB.

There is a cost to having so much language ("all the language, all the time") available at different stages of the program lifecycle (macroexpand, compile, runtime, ...). Not sure if a Janet program can run eval, but it still has a garbage collector, etc.

Even a Go equivalent is 1.9MB.