Common Lisp is fine for bit-twiddling, you can see it for yourself if you read this chapter in Practical Common Lisp: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-

Common Lisp is fine for bit-twiddling, you can see it for yourself if you read this chapter in Practical Common Lisp: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-parsing-binary-files.html http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-parsing-binary-fil... The FFI of Common Lisp is on par with more mainstream languages like Python.