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Message from discussion Very poor Lisp performance
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Jon Harrop  
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 More options 14 Aug 2005, 17:24
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: Jon Harrop <use...@jdh30.plus.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 17:24:59 +0100
Local: Sun 14 Aug 2005 17:24
Subject: Re: Very poor Lisp performance
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jayessay wrote:
> Jon Harrop <use...@jdh30.plus.com> writes:
>> Ulrich Hobelmann wrote:
>> > I wouldn't consider 5 times as slow as a *functional* language very
>> > competitive, but it might be fast enough for many problems.

>> Well, it's relative. Most of the other Lisp/Scheme implementations were
>> two orders of magnitude slower. Stalin gets even closer than SBCL.

> Which Lisps are you talking about?

Primarily CMUCL and SBCL.

> We've already seen where Allegro
> is faster than this SBCL timing and it hadn't even been optimized yet.
> I would be surprised if Lispworks were much different in this regard
> as well.

Is Lispworks free?

>> Also, MLton often beats g++, so functional languages aren't slow coaches
>> any more...

> So do many CL implementations on many benchmarks when "properly"
> written.  Several have been shown here in the past.

What kinds of tasks is Lisp best at, in terms of performance? I Googled for
information on this but most of the sites I found were no longer up.

> Typically this
> starts with the original posting "showing" how bad CL is supposed to
> be when comparing optimized C/C++ with naively written CL.  It also
> often ends with the CL version beating the optimized C/C++ version.

Can you point me to some examples of this? I heard of a benchmark written
long ago where some Lisp gurus managed to code an equivalently-efficient
implementation in Lisp. However, it is important to know how easily an
efficient version can be written. LOC is a very rudimentary measure of
development time.

> Most typical of all is that such benchmarks (including this ray
> tracing thing) don't have much of anything interesting to say about
> anything.

I think my conclusions were interesting. In particular, I was surprised to
see modern functional language implementations doing so well at what is
arguably their weakest point.

I'd like to do another benchmark with an example from scientific computing
next...

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com


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