Lua isn't homoiconic and doesn't have LISP style macros; yes there's this or that patch available, but like all other attempts at implementing macros in other l

Lua isn't homoiconic and doesn't have LISP style macros; yes there's this or that patch available, but like all other attempts at implementing macros in other languages, it never comes close to being as good as what LISP does naturally, because in LISP code is data literally. In other words, Lua has nothing to do with LISP, except that it's your favorite, hence I don't understand this comment. As for TCO, it's regrettable that the JVM runtime doesn't provide support, however you can work around it by implementing trampolines, which is how developers of Scala, Clojure and PureScript have managed to live. For example you can implement a fairly efficient and lazy IO type, like the one in Haskell, which then gives you memory-safe tail-calls for free. Examples include the Free monad or the Task type from Scala. The only downside of this approach is that it involves effectively building your own call-stack and keeping it in heap, which stresses the garbage collector and implies some indirection. But then again, if you'll look at the TCO performance of platforms supporting it (e.g. .NET, ES6), TCO calls have a performance penalty which can be quite significant, so I'm not sure that you'd gain much in terms of performance. And if you measure the performance of FP-heavy Scala and Clojure, you'll see that it's not bad compared with Scheme implementations or Haskell, in spite of trampolines being used for tail-calls.