> Now, before you go out and write your next project in Lisp, you should keep something in mind. Lisp is not the fastest or smallest language out there, it was not designed to be so. There are some pretty good implementations of Lisp out in the wild, but don’t expect them to outperform C, Go, Lua, or even Python most of the time.

SBCL, Chez, and other Lisps produce extremely good native code, competitive with C (sometimes even better due to the ease of run-time compilation) when you're aiming for performance, without sacrificing run-time safety in less critical parts of the code.

Binaries are a couple MB compressed.

> If you’re going to program something in Lisp you should keep these things in mind:

> - How important is execution speed?

> - How important is program/runtime size?

> - How important is portability?

> If you value any three of these too much, then you might not want to write your program in Lisp.

As a standardized language with a plethora of implementations with different pros and cons, Common Lisp is remarkably portable. Decades-old code still compiles on modern platforms and OS's.