What does HackerNews think of cl-autowrap?
(c-include "file.h") => complete FFI wrapper
Language:
Python
Common lisp has a "pretty OK" story for calling C code whenever some speed is needed [0,1]. In my opinion, they suffer from some of the documentation/quick start problems that common lisp has, but they're otherwise usable.
Some of Naughty Dog's late 90's/early 2000's games (Jak and Daxter, Jak II) were written in a lisp called GOAL, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp [2]
[0] https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap [1] https://github.com/cffi/cffi#cffic2ffi [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
If you're interested in FFI, then yeah CFFI is the standard. The other comments addressed speed, I also wanted to point out https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap which is built on top of CFFI and can help get a wrapper up and running faster. After using autowrap's c-include you can then use CFFI basically like normal or some useful autowrap/plus-c's helper functions -- e.g. in one project, I have an SDL_Event (https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_Event) and to access event.key.keysym.scancode I have a helper function that's just (plus-c:c-ref event sdl2-ffi:sdl-event :key :keysym :scancode). Last year I wanted to try out using FMOD, and even though it's closed source and has a (to me) "interesting" API things worked easily: https://gist.github.com/Jach/dc2ec7b9402d0ec5836a935384cacdc... More work would be needed to make a nice wrapper, type things more fully, etc. but depending on the C library you might find someone's already done that (or made a start) and made it available from quicklisp.
For Common Lisp, there's ABCL ( https://abcl.org ) which is a CL on the JVM and, otherwise, LispWorks bundles a nice Java FFI.
But, additionally, CL makes binding to C libraries really easy via CFFI and things like cl-autowrap ( https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap ) so, when there isn't a native lisp library, it's often easy enough to just use a C library in your program (or, I suppose, anything that can compile to something compatible with C like `extern C` in C++ and the equivalent constructs in Rust)