The binaries are big because it's shipping a preprended lisp kernel together with the entire programming language in a heap image. It's also largely dependent o

The binaries are big because it's shipping a preprended lisp kernel together with the entire programming language in a heap image. It's also largely dependent on the Common Lisp implementation. SBCL is very inline happy and consequently consumes more memory than other Lisp implementations. A fresh CCL image consumes at most 8 MB on my Mac. If you want small binaries, then you'd want tree-shaking, not an entirely new language. LispWorks is already capable of producing small, graphical hello world examples. Even then, a hello world is a rather silly benchmark for binary size, especially since it totally ignores the fixed cost of a language runtime and no serious person is distributing a hello world.