If you want to write a program in a Lisp and ship it as a compiled binary, your best bet is to use Common Lisp and compile it with SBCL. A stripped SLAD binary will be way smaller with way less overhead then running a whole host of bytecode on a VM like Racket or Clojure.

But few people care about overhead or executable size much anymore, outside of embedded systems.

What most people care about is computational performance, and clojure performs OK by this metric (certainly SBCL can still beat it in many use cases on this metric as well, but often only by a modest margin)

sbcl also has the ability to statically link all your C dependencies using CFFI’s STATIC-IMAGE-OP

Clojure can also do it. Java Abstracted Foreign Function Layer https://github.com/jnr/jnr-ffi

I don't think that's exactly the same: CFFI has the ability to bind C libraries with minimal boilerplate just like jnr-ffi does. But, in addition, with CFFI (and sbcl built with a particular set of flags) you can generate an CL image that only depends on GLIBC because you've statically linked all your .so dependencies into the resulting image.

If you are writing software in an enterprise then Java / JVM is a well understood quantity with a whole lot of deployment options. Being something that looks exactly like every other Java program from the point of view of those deploying it is a huge win.

Can you expand on the comment about Kubernetes and VMs?

I don't know much about Kubernetes but AFAIK people just put a jar file and JVM in the container image and run it just like any other server app. The jar files can get big (100+ MB) if you have lots of deps, but not to the extent that container image size would be problematic in normal server app environments.

Well JAR files are that big because many java devs import libraries that they never use and you end up with 100+ dependencies when you really need 10. Clojure (Maven) has a way of dealing with this using :exclusions. My typical jar files are 10 - 50MB which are manageable today very well.

You can compile the Clojure project with graalvm, or you can compile the Clojure-clr project (or Clojure project translated by ikvm.net) with the .net core CoreRT