A number of things need to happen before we evaluate a module, and the order these things are done is important. Here we give an overview.
Creation of literal values.
In immediate mode, we want to use the exact same literal values as in the source forms. Since we cannot embed the values in the bytecode, we have to pass them in from the run-time environment. As in non-immediate mode, the compiler generates fields for the literals, but does not generate code to set the fields. Instead, it uses reflection to set the fields. This has to be done after the class is initialized, which means we cannot place anything that depends on the literals in the class initializer. (Alternatively, the class initializer could access the literals table using a thread-local variable, and use that to initialize the literal fields.)
Initializing public fields for exported declarations.
Each expored declarations has an associated public field
that can be accessed by other modules.
These are usually final fields.
Evaluating the top-level forms aka the model-level statements and expressions.
In a static module, this code is in the class initializer (check this).
In a non-statric module (including immeediate mode), this is
placed in run method.
In a static method, these actions are also done in the class initializer.