Why I Chose Common Lisp
After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure. I was writing a some CLI apps, and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It was incredibly painful, and at the end of it, I still didn't have standalone, fast-starting native executables. I decided that that was a requirement for my main driving hobby language, and that Clojure didn't have it. It was then that I decided to move on from Clojure.
I started shopping around for a new lisp to use after hours like I'd done before with my home projects. I had specific requirements in mind, though I didn't actually list them when I started. I can list them now in hindsight, though:
Must have a good ecosystem, with at least the following libraries well-implemented, thus supporting my common use cases of making CLI tools:
