As a datapoint Quake is quite old. When it was released it used software rendering on a Pentium2. While is nice that everything from the ground up is written in lisp it sounds as if you are only achieving the performance of a P2 on modern hardware. What is the performance gap between Mezzano and an OS/application written in C/C++?
Folks are missing the point with performance. The Mezzano compiler + translating LLVM into Lisp wont be very efficient. That’s not the point. It’s crazy that a game like that runs on a non-Windows non-UNIX machine that is written from the ground up in Common Lisp, by way of compiling an application into a bunch of Lisp source code first.
I built it (circa 1996) on HP PA-RISC workstations, like HP-715's. There was no assembly code for those, just portable C. The frame rate wasn't great, but it played.
Both Quake 1 and Quake 2 ran fine on my Pentium MMX (and i guess regular Pentium since they didn't use the MMX stuff) using the software rasterizer and Quake 3 also ran fine on my Pentium 2 with a GeForce 2.
The reason it is slow is not because it is written is Lisp but because of how it is implemented, primarily because it is a hobby project. Graphics are rendered on the CPU for example.
