[patrec]

Can you show some concrete examples? Non-idiotimatic Common Lisp compiled with SBCL can certainly come within a single digit integer factor of C, but your claim is much stronger. As for Chez, I have yet to see some code that compares favorably to even a fast scripting language, let alone a medium or high performance compiled language, and that's even if the code is littered with fixnum version of operators etc. Not what I'd call "very good performance characteristics" unless compared to bash or python.

[_ph_]

I have seen tight functions compiled with SBCL matching and occasionally exceeding the speed of the C version. SBCL is a compiler which produces very good code. If you add enough type information so that SBCL can infer the types of all operations, you will get performance which compares very well to C.

[TurboHaskal]

There is no such thing as idiomatic Common Lisp.

[mtreis86]

CL-PPCRE is faster than the C version

[patrec]

It used to be, and when Edi Weitz first wrote it over a decade ago it was a very elegant example of the power of having a language that makes efficient code gen at runtime both possible and easy -- a single developer was able to outperform libraries with dozen of man years of investment over a beer-bet. But I'd be extremely suprised if that were still the case or if it were even within the same order of magnitude as the fastest regexp engines.

Also, despite the fact that scenarios that can leverage "jit-for-free" are both a best case scenario for lisps and not that rare in different fields (from firewall rules to stencil computations) to the best of my knowledge, even in this niche lisp plays absolutely no role in practice. To be clear, I don't think this due to any inherent shortcoming of lisp itself, indeed I suspect it's mostly due to brain-drain.