🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com> writes:

> If you write a fibonacci program, full of deeply nested subroutine
> calls, than scheme will run faster -- because perl hasn't optimized
> the argument call stack yet.  But for many other things it's plenty
> fast.  Don't listen to this "Perl is 10x slower than Scheme" drivel,
> because it's simply not true.

Perl and Scheme are *languages*.  It is virtually nonsensical to speak
of one *language* to be faster than another.

Mind you, I'm not directing this to you alone, but also to the people
defending the Scheme (or any other) standpoint.

Even in a given language, there is often much scope for improvement.
For instance, all that R4RS, one of the standards for Scheme, says
about vectors versus lists is that the former will "typically" be
faster than the latter.  "Typically", however, is usually translated
to "constant" versus "linear".

Tail recursion is indeed important.  In practice, however, it's not
that big a deal.  The Scheme community has been excited for the past
twenty years that the general mechanism of function calls can be as
fast as the more specific looping mechanisms.  Good: I find this
exciting too.  But when I program in Scheme, I still use loop macros,
because these are more intuitive and convenient.

On the other hand, large parts of Scheme are still implementable as
any conventional language is.  Scheme *is* a conventional language if
you don't use things like higher-order functions, after all: it is a
perfectly reasonable imperative language, which I have used as such.
A lot of traditional compiler technology still works.  Things still
run pretty damn fast if the compiler is reasonably intelligent.  Two
places we hurt big is in tag checking and arrays, mainly a trade-off
between safety (in the technical sense) and performance.  I could turn
off all of these on a reasonable compiler and not lose any more at
that point.  I can use soft type checking technology to get reasonable
performance *without* sacrificing safety.

If you have specific examples of where Scheme -- in theory -- will
lose over Perl -- in theory -- please post them.  I am (and others
like me are) interested in hearing about what people like you use
these langauges for, and what problems we need to address.  At the
same time, go easy on using words like "drivel" in a poor context.