[Chicken-users] benchmarks

[address@hidden]

There are lies, damned lies and benchmarks, so ...

I was trying to determine the function call overhead, so I wanted to measure 
how much it takes to
call a million times a do-nothing function. The answer is ~6 seconds in the 
interpreter and
2 seconds in the compiler (on my old PII machine). So, compilation gives a 3x 
speedup.
Now, what surprises me is that interpreted mzscheme is as fast a compiled 
chicken!
How can it be? Here is my code (yes, I know the while could be coded better, 
but it does
not matter in the issue of why mzscheme is so fast (or chicken so slow)):

; 6.539s interpreter
; 2.059s compiler
; 2.2s mzscheme

(define-macro (while c . do)
  `(let loop ()
    (if (not ,c) 'done (begin ,@do (loop)))))

(define (f) #f) ;; do nothing function

(define N 1000000)
(time
 (define i 0)
 (while (< i N)
   (f)
   (set! i (add1 i))))

It could be that I am doing something stupid, it is my first benchmark!
N.B. the -higienic option is on.

Generally speaking, how does chicken performance compare with other Scheme
implementations? (I expect there is a document somewhere ...)