Message from discussion Very poor Lisp performance

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From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?F=F6rster_vom_Silberwald?=" <chain_l...@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Very poor Lisp performance
Date: 15 Aug 2005 05:08:11 -0700
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Jon Harrop wrote:
> 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.
>
> Also, MLton often beats g++, so functional languages aren't slow coaches any
> more...

Jon: You may not forget that you are testing for micro benchmarks.
Surely, a Python will never become faster in the long run. However, all
the things will change if we were benchmarking really complicated code
of many thousand of lines.

When I was younger (now I am 31) I also believed benchmarking is a
must. However, in the meantime it is even this: if your ray-tracer in
OCaml were 100000 times faster than the Bigloo-Scheme version I would
not opt for OCaml quickly. Perfromance is important, no question, but
in a code project it is a rather tiny part.


Schneewittchen