Good idea, Alex! This 2nd patch removes the neg? check and adds a quick bail transducer for cases where n <= 0. It also made it slightly faster still:

(now ~35% faster than original)

The only time that neg? case will be hit is if take is passed n <= 0, so I think this is correct. However, you might consider some different way to handle that particular case - for example, it could be pulled out of the transducer function entirely and be created as a separate transducer function entirely. I'm not sure that's worth doing, but it's an idea.

Hi Alex, try running the tests... AFAICT it's all still working as advertised: For (take 0) or (take -1) then the pos? check fails, but we must ensure to not call rf for that iteration. For all other (take n) cases only the pos? check is executed apart from the last iteration (which causes a single superfluous neg? call) The current path/impl always does 2 checks for all iterations and hence is (much) slower.

From a superficial skim, I see checks for pos? and then neg? which both exclude 0 and that gives me doubts about that branch. That may actually be ok but I will have to read it more closely.

Proposed patch, passes all existing tests