The compiler has a lot of assumptions about the possible types of IPersistentCollection literals and rightfully so. The strange thing with this case is, that taking the (constant) value works as soon as count is defined, but using it as an argument hits a closed dispatch for emitting the empty variants of the various literals.
> (deftype T [] clojure.lang.IPersistentCollection (count [_] 0)
> (def ^:const t (T.))
> (meta t)
java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Unknown Collection type
Compiler.java:2860 clojure.lang.Compiler$EmptyExpr.emit
Compiler.java:3632 clojure.lang.Compiler$InvokeExpr.emitArgsAndCall
...
EDIT updated the ticket after some investigation
NOTE attached test patch doesn't even implement (count (link: )) for the deftype, which just triggers a rightful AbstractMethodError
