>, and most dynamic GCd languages In Common Lisp there are tricks to avoid doing dynamical allocations within your critical (read "requires high performance")

>, and most dynamic GCd languages In Common Lisp there are tricks to avoid doing dynamical allocations within your critical (read "requires high performance") code, so the GC doesn't bother you. Couple this with type declarations, "inline" declarations (which tell the Lisp compiler to inline certain functions) and, if you know what you're doing, the Lisp code will compile to pretty good (read: fast, optimized) machine language that will run seriously fast (at the same speed or close to the same speed than C or Fortran.) So you can choose to avoid needing the GC on your high performance code, and enjoy the comfort of garbage-collected dynamic memory management on the code that is not so performance-critical.