Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken vs Perl

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 02:11:41PM +0200, Sascha Ziemann wrote:
> I tried to use Chicken for a job I would use normally Perl for to find
> out whether Chicken might be a useful alternative.

A great test!

> And now hold on tight! It takes more than one minute for the same data:
> 
> real  1m16.540s
> user  1m14.849s
> sys   0m0.664s
> 
> And there is almost no significant performance boost by compiling it:
> 
> real  0m1.810s
> user  0m1.664s
> sys   0m0.140s

The most important question is: which version of Chicken is this?
There have been massive optimizations done to irregex (the regex
engine used in Chicken) between 4.6.0 and 4.7.0

> So the questions are:
> 
> - What is wrong with the Chicken code?

At first glance it looks fine.

> - How can I profile the code?

Build it with "csc -profile ...", then run it.  It will
produce a profile file which you can read with "chicken-profile".

> - Why is there no difference between csi and csc?

Probably because the inefficiency is in irregex, which is already
compiled; the bottleneck is not in your code, so making it faster
by compiling it won't help.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
--
"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer
 is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically
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 experience much like composing poetry or music."
                                                        -- Donald Knuth