While I have only a cursory knowledge of Lisp and the community, pg seems to be a fairly prominent figure. I've see alot of references to his books and comments are usually speak highly of him. Regardless, I don't doubt that there isn't a way to speed it up, (As I noted, I think one of the additional reasons is many more C/C++ programmers to tap) but I doubt outside of assembler, that you'll get faster runtimes than C with anything. Development time is another issue entirely :)

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."