Re: Guile benchmark

[Chris Vine]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:00:54 +0100
Andy Wingo <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu 26 Jan 2017 09:39, Rchar <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I wanted to compare Guile scheme to other scheme implementations
> > and I found
> > this:https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html
> >
> > Is Guile slow or fast, comparing to others?  
> 
> Besides what Mike said, there are two kinds of Schemes in that
> benchmark: the ones that compile to native machine code (ahead of
> time, either with their own compilers or by emitting C, or
> just-in-time), and the ones that run some kind of bytecode
> interpreter.
> 
> Schemes that compile to native code go faster.  Guile compiles to
> bytecode right now, so it's generally (though not always!) slower than
> the native-compiling schemes.  But compared to the
> bytecode-interpreter schemes it's pretty fast.
> 
> One day we'll have a native compiler and we can start playing
> benchmark games with the big kids :)

On reading this, out of interest I wrote a very simple program solving
primes, using the basic 'seive odd divisors to square root' algorithm.
I tested guile-2.0, guile-2.2, chicken and chez scheme on it.

guile-2.0 was a little slower than chicken with chicken compiled to C,
but guile-2.2 on that test took about 75% of the time of chicken, and
about 50% of the time of guile-2.0.  chez scheme was fastest of all,
taking about 50% of the time of chicken.  OK, chicken may not be the
fastest of "compile to C" schemes.

Having said that, all of them were considerably slower than the same
code written in native C++, probably because the compiler optimizes
better (it was about 5 times faster than chez scheme).  The performance
of clang and gcc was pretty much the same.

Solving primes is probably not particularly representative and I didn't
spend any more time with other benchmarks, so take it as you will. The
performance of guile-2.2 at run time was encouraging however.

Chris