SBCL is not as "high-level", especially when you are aiming for speed. Yossi already wrote about this http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.ht

SBCL is not as "high-level", especially when you are aiming for speed. Yossi already wrote about this http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html , so there is no need for me to do it: If you use Lisp’s static annotation system, your code becomes uglier than Java, and much less safe (I don’t think Lisp does static checking of parameter types, it just goes ahead and passes you an object and lets you think it’s an integer). Additionally, Lua only has "one data structure type" - that's also "higher-level" than what you have to do in Lisp, deciding among singly-linked lists, arrays, hash tables, binary trees, lexical trees, etc. So while SBCL has its place, there's something about Lua you have to admire, don't you think?