I'm not a compiler expert by any means, but I would've thought the more functional nature of racket to be a plus for writing compilers. Plus, there's the nanopass framework.
I'm curious to know what was lost to the Lisp users in the change on Apple's Newton device going from the early Ralph implementation in Lisp to cplusplus.
On r/lisp there was a rant that included a reflection that things would be done in a third the time. There was an ask for $60M to apply Lisp to know a different world. Apple can easily afford a $180M experiment to see Ralph/Dylan implementation of iOS/macOS. If proved successful would the software platform leap how the hardware has done across multiple architectures? The ARM M series devices are a there and back again move given Apple Newton was on ARM and Apple invested which kept the idea alive.
The design decisions in this paper strongly resonate with me. It helped me to overcome my aversion to JVM-hosted languages, and settle down to learn Clojure.
I'm a research mathematician, at one extreme where code is steps up a mountain. I don't need to summit twice, so productivity is far more important than speed. Nevertheless, the fastest Clojure time trials use GraalVM:
Not even exactly the scripting language, more so that they used PLT Scheme (now Racket) for writing tooling, including compiler into various scheme variants they used as internal scripting in games.
In other words, I never coded something sufficiently big to understand the pros of CL.
Hence, I'm curious. What stuff I'm missing out in terms of language features and libraries?