Sure, when you deploy a jar you expect a JVM for the host. So it’s not self-contained executables. Well since JVM is that much popular it is “as if” it was self-contained, but it’s unfair comparison for SBCL.
I’m pretty happy in Common Lisp land for now.
On one hand, sometimes you write some stuff and it is blazingly fast compared to my Clojure experience. On the other hand, you are just sad not having the hashmap syntax from Clojure when you have to deal with data (alist and plist seems archaic, CLOS class are cool but over verbose for simple use cases…). Another missing part it the stability and omnipresence of the Clojure sequence abstraction.
A Common Lisper will argue that I can have these features using libraries or writing some reader macros. As I’m doing side toy projects for now, I’m trying to stick to vanilla CL (except for cl-ppcre, once again clojure.core has a great regex facility).
I’m not a the deployment stage yet, but it seems to be a recurring issue in CL.
I really feel at home, SBCL, asdf and quicklisp are really sweet and lovely pieces of software, even if things are quircky sometimes, it’s OK, things are quircky in Clojure sometimes too.