Re: [Chicken-users] [Q] Are there any performance-wise differences between Chicken 5 and Chicken 4?

[Jörg F . Wittenberger]

On Oct 11 2018, Sungjin Chun wrote:

> Hi, it seems that Chicken 5 will be released soon or else :-) I'd like to
> know whether there's any performance enhancement in Chicken 5 compared to
> Chicken 4.
>
> Thanks in advance.

So far I measured only very specific workloads.

Unfortunately those did not exactly benefit from the improvements which 
went into Chicken 5.

I would at least not expect a general performance enhancement.

> PS)
> I'd like to port my library to Chicken scheme (for fun) and the library is
> located at https://bitbucket.org/chunsj/th/ . Mostly, this library uses FFI

If most of your runtime is going to be spent in foreign libraries anyway, 
the performance difference of the Chicken layer is likely to be irrelevant.

However if you're about to do math in Chicken than 4 vs. 5 is going to be a 
difference like day and night. 5 has full numeric tower with arbitrary 
precision and complex numbers etc. --- Chicken 4 doesn't.

> to the underlying libTH and libTHNN from torch. Are there any reference
> on writing FFI code in Chicken scheme?

Let's say, I originally came to like Chicken for it's FFI.

It's easy with the information from the manual. 
http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Interface%20to%20external%20functions%20and%20variables 
It's tricky anyway. I'd suggest to have a look into eggs source code which 
link to other libraries. I'd recommend the "iup" egg, if I had to make a 
pick (which is certainly unjust and just a "start reading here").

When you struggle, just come back.  You'll be welcome.

Cheers

/Jörg