> The one downside that I've found is that it doesn't correspond to the hardware as much. The hardware keeps changing. What Lisp provides is a way to access lo

> The one downside that I've found is that it doesn't correspond to the hardware as much. The hardware keeps changing. What Lisp provides is a way to access low-level details when necessary, but with a default mode of operation that is managed (developer-friendly): GC, safety checks, arbitrary precision integers, etc. Like for all languages, a compiler can be told to try more optimizations if you want, and if you are ready to spend a little more work on it. In some implementations, you can extend the primitives known the compiler to emit better assembly code (e.g. https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2014/08/16/how-to-define-new-intrinsics-in-sbcl/ https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2014/08/16/how-to-define-new-intrins...).