Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken and Gambit

[Sunnan]

Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:

> You're right in that current compilers don't optimise as much as they 
> could. But it doesn't have to be that way: if you're writing C-style 
> Scheme code, it's possible to compile that to C that runs as fast as 
> handwritten C. I don't know of a compiler that actually does this 
> (Stalin?), but it's certainly possible :-) And on the other hand, if 
> you're writing functional code, there are a whole bunch of 
> optimizations that can end up outperforming equivalent hand-written C, 
> even though C is the intermediate language being used by the Scheme 
> compiler. For instance, the compiler can do a lot of the drudge-work 
> of inlining and specialization before the C code is emitted, which is 
> much harder to arrange at the C level. And an often-overlooked item is 
> memory management: using garbage-collection is usually faster than 
> using malloc/free for allocation-heavy programs.


Thank you very much for these comforting words.
Another, perhaps related question: how about the overhead for function 
calls that C has? Is there a way around that, maybe compile to code that 
uses goto and weird stuff like that?
(I'm afraid I'm coming of as even more ignorant that I really am, but 
I'm curious.)