I could easily make it not alloc any memory if I wanted it not to. If I want to write C in Lisp, I can do so, but what reason do I have to do that?
Well, let me see, efficiency, a ram smaller than 4GB, power.
For all practical purposes this is fairly fast. If I really needed to run that FORMAT 1000000 times, I would just cache the value by typing 2 extra characters to make the string loaded at readtime or perform some other sort of caching.
Notice how the blind lisp moron changes his position accordingly; first it was "lisp is fast" now it is "fairly fast for practical purposes". You don't need to cache anything, the compiler can use memoization, at least C compilers do.
I'm not going to waste my time clearing up misconceptions about Lisp in your head nor how you misinterpreted the results of a simple benchmark.
If you're not going to waste time trying to change something about my opinion then it makes me wonder why you argue with me. Do you just want to advocate lisp and show your lisp buddies that you're the coolest geek in the block?
General on topic reply: tuning your Lisp application for performace isn't that hard and there's many books that go into excellent detail about this. Oh, and whoever responded to this thread seemed to be under the impression that Lisp is all Cons cells, which is just wrong
No it isn't. Lisp is cons cells and atoms.
it has plenty of rich data types: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Contents.htm Arrays, Hashtables, Strings, Characters, Numbers of all kinds(integers, fixnums, bignums, ratios, complex, etc), Classes/Instances/Meta-classes, Structures, Cons cells and so on.
These can all be expressed in terms of cons cells and atoms. Another reason why lisp is slow - all the run-time mix-match and jumps from superclass to subclass lookup is no good, CLOS is the only thing lisp got right all these years and nobody uses it because they don't want to approach the rest of lisp. I can continue bashing lisp forever, but please make it at least enjoyable by arguing PROPERLY with me (something most lispers can't/won't do).