This is a pretty introductory CL article, mostly a commentary on Norvig's solution to the problem. Still, I learned about the #. readmacro from it. The conclusion: "[The Lisp implementation] was the fastest implementation for all input sizes except the largest one, where it performed just slightly worse than my best Java implementation." GH repo at https://github.com/renatoathaydes/prechelt-phone-number-enco.... Sounds like he was mostly measuring the performance of the SBCL bignum implementation.
It's true that they're just a few seconds, but if he were measuring compilation time then none of the Java tests would come in under 10 000 ms, and (although the graph isn't usefully labeled) it looks like they're around 100 ms.
In one of the articles, it shows SBCL performance does not increase by first compiling it to a binary executable. Compilation overhead in SBCL is therefore negligible.
