From my conversation with lispm, I discovered that each binary sbcl produces includes the lisp compiler. That means for evaluating expressions that cannot be de

From my conversation with lispm, I discovered that each binary sbcl produces includes the lisp compiler. That means for evaluating expressions that cannot be determined at runtime, SBCL does some kind of JIT compilation. I think this is called incremental compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_compiler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_compiler Now it makes sense, SBCL requires a complete compiler embedded in the runtime. Runtime is small enough that you don't care for it. Okay I agree that lisp can be compiled. You just need a clever runtime being able to dynamically compile parts at runtime. If there are lisp implementations that do not require embedding either a compiler or an interpreter in the runtime, I'd doubt their expressiveness.