Re: Planning work

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> Why do you think Way the Second is inferiour?  Because you don't want
> to touch C code anymore with a stick?  I can understand that, of
> course.  Problem is, right now, Scheme code is noticably slower than C
> code.

I don't think imposing a one-time parsing cost at load time is so
horrible.  But a key part is also the portability.  I would really
like something that didn't require compiling and thus separate
versions, one per architecture.

> Would you consider portable C code machine dependent?  Since it must
> be compiled first?  How would you like a system where Scheme code can
> be compiled to machine code, and people are expected to do this for
> reasonable performance of production code?

I wouldn't mind, but indeed, the right way to do this is to have the
compiler invoked automatically by lamdba.

> This is a good position to start from, I'd say, but I wouldn't
> categorically outrule C code as some later optimization hack.  If it
> turns out that by writing a 50 line C function, you can speed up the
> loading of Python code by a factor of 20, would you do it?  What speed
> improvement would you need to see before going to C?

I can't say.