I can't speak for the whole of "the Arc community" any more than you can, but...
I'm not trying to turn Arc into Common Lisp, I'm advocating making Arc fast. There's a difference.
CL was a behemoth because it was a union by committee of all the cruft in every popular Lisp dialect circa 1980. One of Arc's goals is to design from a clean slate. There is not a pressure to conform to bad or inconsistent decisions of the past. None of that has anything to do with performance.
The question becomes: Do we want to make a real general purpose language, or do we want Arc to become "yet another scripting language"?
This is a long term question. We may not need a compiler tomorrow, but I'm not ready to say for the long haul: "Arc is for exploratory programming and rapid prototyping. It will never scale. You shouldn't write ray tracers in it, or image processing, or games. It's fine for web apps -- unless they get allot of traffic."
