Common Lisp has always had pretty good support for compiling to fast machine code. Most people underestimate it, for at least two reasons. One is that it doesn’

Common Lisp has always had pretty good support for compiling to fast machine code. Most people underestimate it, for at least two reasons. One is that it doesn’t have good standing in popular benchmarks relative to C, even with speedy implementations like SBCL, and the common takeaway from such benchmarks is that a language is either as fast as C or infinitely slow. The second reason is that the process of building standalone executables is less accessible than in other languages; even to people familiar with Lisp’s strengths, it’s kind of arcane, giving off the impression that deploying CL code in production is an unsolved problem. Also, Lisp is an old language family, and the quirks of Common Lisp in particular are weird and unfamiliar when coming from any modern language, even Clojure.