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Good Performance

Common Lisp performs well. Most current implementations use modern compiler technology, in contrast to older Lisps, which used very primitive compiler techniques, even for the time. In terms of performance, anyone using a Common Lisp today on almost any computer can expect better performance than could be obtained on single-user PDP-10's or on single-user Lisp machines of mid-1980's vintage. Many Common Lisp implementations have multitasking and non-intrusive garbage collection-both regarded as impossible features on stock hardware ten years ago.

In fact, Common Lisp performs well on benchmarks compared to C. The following table shows the ratio of Lisp time and code size to C time and code size for three benchmarks.

Tak is a Gabriel benchmark that measures function calling and fixnum arithmetic. Traverse is a Gabriel benchmark that measures structure creation and access. Lexer is the tokenizer of a C compiler and measures dispatching and character manipulation.

These benchmarks were run on a Sun 3 in 1987 using the standard Sun C compiler using full optimization. The Lisp was not running a non-intrusive garbage collector.