As I had noted in my post to Elian, I got the impression (mistaken or not) working with a platform that was written in Lisp written by Paul Graham and on some notes I've seen back and forth between him and Trevor Blackwell. I figured since Paul has for all intensive purposes wrote the book on Lisp, it is pretty optimized.
Now the benches that I saw were mainly IO based and it was a lot slower than Perl which was slower than C which was slower then ASM.
I could certainly be wrong but Lisp seems to bring with it a lot of inherent weight. Again, this is in my very limited experience with it. I don't doubt that Lisp is better suited for certain tasks. In fact my coding style has taken on a more Lisp-ish style in the past 6 months. (Though I would take Perl over Lisp anyday.)
-Lee
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Lisp is actually really light weight in most things, though having to support continuations (if you're using a dialect that has them) adds some overhead. It's not quite Forth-ish in its lightness, but it's not that far off.
Part of Lisp's sluggishness comes from its very nature--it's really awkward to do a lot of things in Lisp. It just doesn't lend itself well to many problems. (For those you apparently need to use Scheme, which rumor has it will end world hunger, bring about world peace, and aid in the development of a really good tasting diet soda...)
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It's hard to say without knowing the specific benchmarks (and the code). It's certainly easy to do IO (in particular) slowly in Lisp. If one's Lisp has decently optimized read-sequence and write-sequence functions, it's also possible to do it pretty darn fast. One does need to know something about the various functions available to get the best results (e.g. format is incredibly powerful and convenient, but slow. If speed is of the essence, some other output method is called for. And so on.)
I advise against putting too much weight on Graham's opinions. While he's certainly well respected, just as anyone he has his own predelictions and preferences which are entirely personal. For example, one who reads his two books may come out of them with the impression that loop is a bad thing, whereas in the general Common Lisp community, opinions are quite divided on the matter, with extremely well respected people on both sides of the issue. (And actually, ironically enough given that he wrote a book about it, Graham doesn't really seem to like Common Lisp that much at all.)
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