regarding floating-point performance - Re: [Chicken-hackers] 3D engine strategy

[felix winkelmann]

One word about FP speed and benchmarking: Scheme's numeric
system and the desire to generate not too excessive binaries
requires out-of-line implementations of generic arithmetic.
With the right operators, though (fp+, ...) floating-point ops are
done in-line. It might be possible to do something which is
called "speculative inlining" (i believe) where we do the type-checks
in-line. I can look into this, but the bottomline is that you have to
do quite a lot of checks if you want to implement Scheme.

If you look at the shootout and chicken should perform ok in
some of the benchmarks, then probably since optimizations are
enabled for running in fixnum-only mode, which does all math-ops
in-line. But that won't be standards compliant, of course.

So we can't have both, but using the right operators, you will
get (unsafe) inline math ops. Anything beyond that means
static analysis which (again) makes Scheme less flexible and
standards compliant, and additionally is hard to implement for
a highly dynamic language (it works for subsets, though).


cheers,
felix