Re: [Chicken-users] CVS update: hygienically unhygienic

[Peter Keller]

On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 10:37:10PM +0100, felix wrote:
> I forgot some files. But I checked them in right after the first commit.
> It should work now. Otherwise simply remove the dependency for that file.

I got it all working now.

> A good question. I say it is. The way literals are created at run-time
> is safe and simple. But large literals blow up the toplevel procedure
> considerably. And large C functions blow up GCC compile times.
> 
> Yet, I don't find a better compilation strategy for Scheme than the
> one Chicken uses: the alternative (a driver loop - used for example
> by Gambit) is IMHO problematic: you generate large functions
> (in fact I got reports from failed GCC compiles with Gambit 4.0:
> the use of computed gotos in the new release create a huge number
> of control-flow edges... which make compilation times excessively
> long when string optimizations are used). Chicken generates
> (besides the toplevel procedure) many small functions.
> 
> Cross module calls are very cheap. Orders of magnitudes cheaper
> than under Gambit. So dynamically loaded code and separate compilation
> scales actually *much* better under Chicken.
> 
> Chicken is actually faster than Gambit in many mixed mode arithmetic
> benchmarks - but this is of course simple if you have only two numeric
> types, Gambit has more dispatching overhead since it supports the
> full numeric tower.
> 
> So what have we left: the "cheaters" (:-) Bigloo and Stalin - and
> both have no full support for tail-calls and/or first class continuations
> ('nuff said).

Ok. I understand now.

> >MAC OSX! MAC OSX! :)
> 
> Huh? AFAIK Chicken works fine under the current Mac OS X.
> But not version 10.2 (Jaguar). There are some libtool problems, I think.

It is so unbelieveably rare that something works on Mac OS X before it works
on an original BSD box, that I am just besides my self with chagrin.

:)

-pete