Re: [Chicken-hackers] Made a start with CHICKEN 5 proposal

[Felix Winkelmann]

> Long ago I proposed to Felix an implementation of the numbers egg using
> run-time hooks rather than modular renaming of procedures, such that +
> would always go through a hook which would invoke either the fixnum-flonum
> definition in core, or else the definition in any egg that had loaded
> itself into this hook (with the understanding that such eggs don't compose).

That is basically te right approach, but will be terribly inefficient,
and I mean _really_ inefficient. Any attempt to get fast code must
somehow compile to primitive arithmetic instructions, integer or
float.  We do "reasonably" well right now, but still need better
performance (i.e. unboxed flonum operations). If a tight loop with an
integer counter needs an extra out-of-line (or even CPS)
procedure-call, we lose heavily.


felix