Storing objects to disk in Lisp is frequently pretty straightforward; you can just print the object to a text file and compress said text file. I've never done

Storing objects to disk in Lisp is frequently pretty straightforward; you can just print the object to a text file and compress said text file. I've never done anything large myself, so I can't vouch for the scalability of this method, but it seems like it'd work pretty well. One of the many very nice things about CL is that most objects print as something that can be losslessly read back in by 'read'. Also, you can define such print representations for your objects, and it's easy to do because you have full access to the reader. Also, it's not terribly difficult to write interfaces to C libraries; CFFI makes it very nice, although not as nice as Chicken.