I agree: CL is a wonderful language but you have to embrace the whole environment/philosophy if you want to adopt it. And the language is not so easy to embed which prevents many "enterprise"/application development use cases.
As a matter of fact the only game in town for embedding CL code is ECL which:
1) relies on the Bohem garbage collector
2) is LGPL licensed
Both points have cons which might discourage embedding of Common Lisp code in other applications.
Matters would be different if there was something like a CL to C transplier adopting a generational GC distributed with a MIT/BSD like license.
My point was not about peformances but rather about embedding. CL performances are good and toghether with interactive development these are the main selling points. It's a compiled programming language that feels like a scripting language "done right". However try to develop something like an embeddable library in SBCL and then use it in native Android, Ios , Mac and Windows applications. This is something that can be done in Javascript, Go, Dart, C,C++, Lua and so on. As far as I know the only CL that can achieve something similar is ECL. In my opinion this limits considerably CL adoption because it forces to adopt the entire ecosystem as a whole.
True, but one very great advantage of Common Lisp is that it’s a (reasonably) well-designed system, borne of the combined experience of many people. It has many features which seem like hacks (e.g. optional dynamic scoping) or historical baggage (e.g. dynamic scoping) or like over-engineering (e.g. UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-REDEFINED-CLASS), but which are actually the product of sound engineering practice, and which lead to solid, well-engineered code.
Fennel piggy-backs on a known and widely deployed language / VM.
This gives them different capabilities, and very different possible adoption curves.