Re: [Chicken-users] two minor tweaks to runtime.c

[Jörg F . Wittenberger]

On Sep 29 2011, Alan Post wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 12:09:19PM +0900, Alex Shinn wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Alan Post 
> > <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > Will you show me this data for the current implementation?
> >
> > The first implementation doesn't need to justify itself,
> > just be working.
>
> *nods*

True.

However I consider standard engineering practice, which does remove
*complexity* from code and moreover offers the compiler much better
chances to schedule independent code (where we had a conditional
dependency before) worth a try without overkill.

And frankly: I'm trying to get an application working.  Improving
chicken just happens along the way.

In fact I feel kind of sorry that there is such a thread arose from
a simple change.

I don't not have benchmarks for a reason: they would cost me too much
time to do right.  Personally I don't believe too much in benchmarks
anyway.  I believe in fast execution and source code review.

How should the community ever be able to improve over the current state
of affairs, if each suggestion is upfront required to come with a
benchmark, which is than probably first taken apart to show how flawed
it is?

Given how small the difference to the code is: wouldn't it be reasonable
to just give it a try?

I for one forgot to measure the time of first recompilation of chicken
with those changes already in the compiler.  But I was surprised.



Or let me take the threading problem I solved ages ago.  I did NOT want
to get into that business.  All I wanted was to have my prog run on
chicken as it did on rscheme.  Benchmarks said chicken is faster at
that time.  What a lie a benchmark can be!  It was crawling slow.
Tracked that down to the timeout queue.  Fixed the complexity issue.
Problem solved.  Hm.  So how would I device a benchmark case for that one?

And why?  It's obviously faster.  Not with one or two threads.  But those
don't suffer either.


/Jörg