Lisp won't save you from yourself. I bet a Go program using an equivalent representation (assumption being you naively used READ) would exhibit similar memory c

Lisp won't save you from yourself. I bet a Go program using an equivalent representation (assumption being you naively used READ) would exhibit similar memory consumption. However, that doesn't mean that you don't have other options: - Use an array - Load the entire file in a memory buffer and skip the reader - Use mmap (for extra points, you can keep the entire file outside the Lisp heap but still manipulate it in Lisp)