>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html

> to Lisp. Some of them are reporting competitive performance. However, when I
> try to run their programs with either CMUCL or SBCL they are two orders of
> magnitude slower. Given the number of people claiming similarly good
> performance, I'd like to know what the possible cause of the relative
> slowdown on my computer is?

> My system is an unladen 900MHz Athlon T-bird with 768Mb RAM running Debian
> testing with SBCL 0.8.16 and CMUCL "19b-release-20050628-3 + minimal debian
> patches". Other people have both slower and faster CPUs and more and less
> RAM but all are consistently much faster than mine.

> I believe SBCL always compiles to native code and I am asking CMUCL to
> compile to native code with:

> (compile-file "ray4.lisp")
> (load "ray4.x86f")
> (time (main 6.0 "image.pgm" 256.0 4.0))

> Any ideas?