Message from discussion
Very poor Lisp performance
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Message-ID: <42ff7f92$0$17484$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net>
From: Jon Harrop <use...@jdh30.plus.com>
Subject: Re: Very poor Lisp performance
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:27:19 +0100
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Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
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Ulrich Hobelmann wrote:
> 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.
>
> Why performance at all?
I became interested in Lisp's performance because several people advocated
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
> error recovery (interactive debugger, restarts...), but not for
> high-performance computing. There you probably want Fortran or C (and
> maybe link them to Lisp).
My background is in computational science. Fortran is fine for trivial
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
> 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...
I think it is productive to choose suitable tasks and implement them in
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
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