@dougmerritt The compilers I listed ran on 32-bit, and 16-bit, none of them were mainframes. BASIC was also more performant on lesser machines too, not sure what your point there is ..
> C is a much, much easier language to compile efficiently.
Absolute garbage nonsense.
> And to this day, Lisp has constructs that do not have simple fast machine code equivalents.
More aboslute nonsense. Maybe you should look at modern C programs ...