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@amszmidt @screwtape @glitzersachen @mark
Yeah yeah yeah.

But I'm a compiler guy. (A) Your standards of efficiency are not my standards of efficiency. (B) Today's state of the art is obviously far better than in the 1980s, and I'm old. (C) Today's CPUs are so fast that efficiency matters (to users, not compiler people) vastly less than decades ago.

Anyway I'm spread out over many disciplines, and in programming, over many programming languages, so forgive me for not knowing what is obvious to you.

I *have* been aware of Lisp's role as a "systems programming language" for Emacs, though, since the first implementation of Lisp-based Emacs. It's for completely general purposes I was wondering about, and I shouldn't even wonder about that, since I'm aware that Lisp compilation has improved dramatically over time.

There's always going to be a battle for the highest levels of efficiency, though. Today people are trying to make Rust and Zig and such as efficient *always* as C, just like people used to try to make C as efficient as programming in assembly (a goal which has largely been long surpassed).

And there will always be purposes for which being within 2x (sometimes even 20x) of C is plenty good enough, and people in that domain will wonder why the above people are making a fuss.