> Haskell, Scala, Java, Go and of course C, C++, Fortran all outperform SBCL in the alioth benchmarks.

The way I read it, SBCL is in the same ballpark of what you mentioned above and magnitudes faster than the rest. Its a logarithmic scale.

Then again its a biased selection of benchmarks. Try finding a faster regular expression engine than CL-PPCRE.

I will stick to the stance pointed out by "Let Over Lambda": Common Lisp is--by language design--the fastest language around, as long as language X does not have COMPILE, it can not beat CL at a whole class of benchmarks (not found on alioth).

Also consider that the c/++ versions use intrinsics which means it's basically a compiler vs random assembly level code. Without that level of optimization they're fairly equivalent.

I imagine commercial Lisps like LispWorks would fare even better.

Depends on what you look at. LispWorks is fast, but not really faster than SBCL in Gabriel benchmarks. But what about real programs, garbage collection, etc.? LispWorks is used because its implementation is very capable, widely ported and it has stuff like a GUI toolkit which runs on Windows, GTK+ and Cocoa/Apple.

Thanks for the info.

As I never used it, besides the usual magazine reviews in the old days, as such I thought it was strong on that area as well.

It is, the 64bit version is really fast, similar to SBCL. But that's already kind of a local maximum. The GC and the rest of the runtime is better, probably CLOS is more optimized, ... LispWorks does not type check code much, but it has type inferencing when optimizing code.

You can see my benchmarks (the last from 2013) on my Mac:

http://lispm.de/lisp/benchmarks.html