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comp.lang.lisp |
> Why performance at all? -- Ulrich Hobelmann wrote: I became interested in Lisp's performance because several people advocated
> Jon Harrop wrote:
>> 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.
Lisp to me for these kinds of tasks, claiming that it was suitably
efficient. I wanted to test that.
> Lisp is good at many things, most notably good My background is in computational science. Fortran is fine for trivial
> error recovery (interactive debugger, restarts...), but not for
> high-performance computing. There you probably want Fortran or C (and
> maybe link them to Lisp).
programs that just loop over arrays of floats. Mathematica is great for
symbolic computation. But there is a huge gap between those where Fortran
isn't expressive enough and Mathematica isn't efficient enough. Languages
like OCaml, SML, Haskell and Lisp fill that gap.
> For symbolic processing, or anything non-number-chrunchy I wouldn't be I think it is productive to choose suitable tasks and implement them in
> surprised if an application written in Lisp (compiled) isn't a bit
> slower than the same app written in C++ or Java. But of course nobody
> writes an app in several languages...
several different languages. It helps other people to learn, e.g. by
comparing C++ code to the equivalent OCaml, and it gives us all an idea of
how efficient and expressive the different languages are.
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com