Re: lazy sweeping.

[Tom Lord]

       Nothing spectacular. But now checkout ... the startup time!
       (this is the time for starting guile, and then pressing ^D)


This is not a very good measure of effective start-up time in
SCM-based (incremental graph translation) Schemes.  Odds are you have
a lot of untranslated code in that image, and when I add my
application code, you'll have even more untranslated code.  Substitute
anything useful for that ^D, and the real costs will start to become
more apparent, especially if your application involves long-running
processes.

SCM performs pretty damn well if what you want is a fast
edit-rerun-debug cycle for CAE and symbolic math tasks, especially
with the special GC for environments.  It's also great if you have an
`eval'-intensive application.

Unexec helps, though I've noted substantial qualitative differences
between unexec _before_ running through most execution paths
vs. _after_: incremental translation in action.

Heck, you want _really_ fast start up time?  Read the first line of
input to Guile before doing _anything_ else, doing a short-circuit 
exit if the first line is just EOF.  That'll be really fast ;-)


-t