Re: [Chicken-users] benchmarks from the Gambit world

[felix winkelmann]

On 8/29/06, address@hidden
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> As the topic of benchmarks appears from time to time
> and "Chicken" is mentioned in the following thread
> as "particularly interesting to compare to"
> I would like to post the following URL:
>
> https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2006-August/000793.html

Thanks, Sven. That is pretty interesting.

But I'd like to point out that all this benchmarking mania somewhat misses the
point. Scheme implementors are often performance freaks (Clinger, Feeley)
and put too much emphasis in raw performance. This is in part because Scheme
traditinionally is a playground for compiler writers and because pure Scheme
is so useless that one is tempted to use it only for benchmarking... ;-)

Scheme implementers would do good by concentrating on things that really
count (like providing extensions, foreign language bindings and better
development environments). Scheme's metaprogramming facilities (combined
with a good ffi) is more than enough to allow specialized and highly
optimized code generation that is sufficiently fast for all purposes.


cheers,
felix

--
http://galinha.ucpel.tche.br:8081/blog/blog.ssp