And arena support, and a parallel GC... there's always something exciting and promising coming up.

The proprietary implementations are also quite good.

Do you have a link to the proposal and the discussion? I am quite interested to see the implementation details. Thanks!

Missing the joke here. The pdf if about a Common Lisp compiler, written in Common Lisp, C, and assembly for good measure.

Yes, people do build anything with Lisp, that is why there are at least two commercial Common Lisp systems around, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

Google Flights is an acquisition of a company using Lisp, ITA Software, they even have a Lisp guide.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml

In Portugal, Siscog used to be a Lisp shop, no idea nowadays.

Then you have the Clojure based companies, where Datomic and Nubank are two well known ones, even if not a proper Lisp, still belongs to the same linage.

Examples with screenshots: http://lisp-screenshots.org/

Some companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ (Routific, Google's ITA Software, SISCOG running resource planning in transportation, trading, big data analysis, cloud-to-cloud services, open-source tools (pgloader, re-written from Python), games (Kandria, on Steam and GOG, runs on the Switch), music composition software and apps…

More success stories: https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/

I myself run web-apps and scripts for clients. Didn't ditch Django yet but working on that.

I used a few different lisps for pet projects and honestly today for me the biggest problem of lisps is the typing. ADTs (and similar systems) are just super helpful when it comes to long term development, multiple people working on code, big projects or projects with multiple pieces (like frontend+backend) and it helps AI tools as well.

And this in not something lisps explored much (is there anything at all apart from Racket/typed dialect?), probably due to their dynamic nature. And this is why I dropped lisps in favour of Rust and Typescript.

This very website that you are using right now, Hacker News, runs on sbcl.

Often as a DSL (domain specific language) for extending applications at runtime and/or configuration. I wouldn't start a "serious" project in Lisp today; meaning, a project with investment behind it, but Lisp can be a real joy to work with, and I've used Clojure for countless hobby projects. Clojure, in particular, has lots of deployments around the tech industry, and it's the foundation of the Jepsen DB test suite, Datomic (an immutable DB), and Metabase, as a few examples. Walmart has a non-trivial amount of Clojure running in prod as well.

*I am learning scheme(dr racket), which is i think derived from lisp*

it _is_ Lisp. Namely lisp-1, vs what one would consider lisp like common lisp would be lisp-2. Difference mostly being that in lisp-1 everything's in single namespace, whereas lisp-2 has more. So, in scheme you cannot have a function and a variable have the same name. In common lisp you can. Other diffs being (syntactically) passing functions and executing them. There are other things, of course, but not that big of a deal. Scheme is simpler and suitable for teaching / getting into lispen. I'd argue it might also be a rather well-equipped DSL.

Scheme is mostly used for teaching, but there are many production applications out there written in Lisp (Emacs for example). Also I'd like to mention Clojure, which is "lispy" and used by big cooperations.