SBCL is an inspiring and very interesting compiler, and it bolts a static-typing system onto Common Lisp that often lets it do pretty decent native-code compila

SBCL is an inspiring and very interesting compiler, and it bolts a static-typing system onto Common Lisp that often lets it do pretty decent native-code compilation. In my ignorant opinion offered up in the spirit of Cunningham's Law, the parts it falls short on don't seem to be related to inadequate static typing. Rather, I feel major pain points are things like (0) the backend codegen seriously sucks, compared to the million-man-hour compilers like that languages like C have. Auto-vectorization is the most obvious of a long list of shortcomings. (1) The core Common Lisp language lacks ways to express basic and critical zero-overhead abstractions, like unboxed arrays of structs. (The zero-overhead subset of SBCL/CL is less expressive than C! Arguably!) (2) Though Lisp macros are great zero-overhead abstractions, Lisp's functional programming abstractions are often pretty expensive, so "lean" Lisp ends up looking disturbingly like plain, procedural C (and an inexpressive subset of it at that). (Or is this some unavoidable consequence of the excessive dynamicism of CL, that a very expressively typed Lisp could potentially solve? I don't know).