Re: [Chicken-hackers] Any thoughts on performance woes?

[Felix Winkelmann]

>> This is a terribly written program. It uses 3-element lists as vectors
>> (including higher-order "vector" arithmetic using "map") and allocates
>> like hell. The compiler can not do much with this code, and it
>> produces CPS calls everywhere.
> 
> It's still rather interesting that Racket and even Gauche don't seem to
> have a problem with this program.

Indeed, I was not trying to make it look otherwise. Apparently Flatt
and Kawei did an excellent job in optimizing their implementations, no
doubt about that.

But I'm sick and tired of people throwing badly written code into the
net and making gross assumptions about implementation performance. The
possible options, the search-space available is massive and a little
difference in programming style can make a vast difference in
performance.

Somehow there seems to be a large number of trolls that use some
ridiculuous piece of code, run it with a handful of implementations
(of course using suboptimal optimization options, since they really
don't know what they're doing) and then generalize their results
without the slightest bit of sense.

I'm a compiler-writer, my job is to be paranoid about performance.
But otherwise raw speed is in most cases secondary (try to run large
real-world programs on Larceny or Stalin and you know what I mean.)

That there are so many implementors in the Lisp and Scheme community
probably makes this irrational emphasis on (execution-time)
performance so apparent in these groups. Or it's the remains of the
trauma of the AI-Winter, I don't know (and I don't care anymore.)

That is (among a few other reasons) why I don't do much Scheme or Lisp
programming anymore - thinking about the community, reading all this
bullshit makes me sick.


felix