"How to make Lisp go faster than C" (2006) http://www.iaeng.org/IJCS/issues_v32/issue_4/IJCS_32_4_19.pdf http://www.iaeng.org/IJCS/issues_v32/issue_4/IJCS_32_4_

"How to make Lisp go faster than C" (2006) http://www.iaeng.org/IJCS/issues_v32/issue_4/IJCS_32_4_19.pdf http://www.iaeng.org/IJCS/issues_v32/issue_4/IJCS_32_4_19.pd... And these figures aren't using the SBCL Lisp compiler which should currently be faster than the one cited. You are correct, it wasn't designed to compete against C. And it has a garbage collector. But make the right choices and a compiler like SBCL can produce surprisingly "clean" (optimized) machine language code.