Is NodeJs faster than Clojure?

I just started learning Clojure. One of the first things I noticed is that there are no loops. That's OK, I can recur. So let's look at this function (from Practical Clojure): (defn add-up "Adds up numbers from 1 to n" ([n] (add-up n 0 0)) ([n i sum] (if (< n i) sum (recur n (+ 1 i) (+ i sum))))) To achieve the same function in Javascript, we use a loop like so: function addup (n) { var sum = 0; f