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I love Common Lisp, but I would definitely think twice before implementing anything I want other people to use on their machines in it. A tiny C executable is pretty nimble in comparison to anything you'll get out of Common Lisp.

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I understand, it isn't that bad though: a web app of mine with dozens of dependencies and all templates and static assets is 35MB with SBCL and core compression (that includes the compiler and debugger, useful to connect to a running app and exploring its state (or even hot reloading code)). I suppose that's in the ballpark of a growing Go application. LispWorks has a tree shaker that builds a hello world in 5MB.

Eh, you can just distribute a .lisp file as though it were a ruby or perl script. CL is faster than the usual scripting languages, but admittedly not as fast as C or Rust.

'Just' is overdoing it a tiny bit :)

Assuming everyone has a CL installed is going to limit the audience pretty drastically.

And what about dependencies? Assume they have quicklisp installed as well?

Like I said, I love Common Lisp, but every language is some kind of compromise.

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