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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Common Lisp has long been a compiled language. Its performance is quite competitive when set against Fortran and C. The idea that it's interpreted (and consequently slow) is a very old myth.

Of course, it helps to use the right data structures if you want fast Lisp code (using lists for everything is not the right choice).

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> Its performance is quite competitive when set against Fortran and C.

No, not at all. It is the same level as Java, a bit slower but I guess that is because there is more work done on Java. Just because you compile a language doesn't mean it is as fast as other compiled languages. You can compile python down to a binary but it will still be super slow.

Where do you get your information? SBCL has been shown to be, when optimized, within the same order of magnitude as C.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192629

If you read the discussions to end, you will notice many objections to the benchmark that you have posted here. Even I have objections. -O3 is not the end of all possible optimizations in C and Fortran.

I hear you, but I was lazy and only gave one reference. There have been, over the years, many demostrations of optimized SBCL being on the same order as C.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

https://drmeister.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/timing-data-compa...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/co...

> within the same order of magnitude

That could mean 9x slower?

990 seconds instead of 110 seconds.

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