That depends. The Common Lisp standard says nothing on the subject. CMUCL[1] and its descendent SBCL[2] do something clever called local call. It's not terribly

That depends. The Common Lisp standard says nothing on the subject. CMUCL[1] and its descendent SBCL[2] do something clever called local call. It's not terribly difficult to optimize hot spots in your code to use local call. Outside of the bottlenecks, the full call overhead isn't significant for the overwhelming majority of cases. It's not like full call is any more expensive than a vtable lookup anyhow. [1] https://cmucl.org/downloads/doc/cmu-user-2010-05-03/compiler-hint.html#local-call https://cmucl.org/downloads/doc/cmu-user-2010-05-03/compiler... [2] https://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Miscellaneous-Efficiency-Issues https://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Miscellaneous-Efficiency-Issues