Re: pass at srfi-89 implementation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Julian Graham" <address@hidden> writes:

> Having done a very quick and dirty integration, I can say that it
> passes the rudimentary test suite I pulled from the SRFI document.  In
> terms of whether it's suitable... well, Marc claims his implementation
> isn't even suitable for Gambit, which apparently has a native
> implementation:
>
> "To give a rough idea of the speed improvement, a trivial procedure
> with 10 optional named parameters and called with 5 named parameters
> runs 14 times faster and generates no garbage when the Gambit
> compiler's builtin optional parameter passing mechanism is used."

Ouch!

> I haven't benchmarked it against `(ice-9 optargs)', but it seems like
> our options are: Use the reference implementation, optimizing it as
> best we can for the peculiarities of Guile; write our own
> implementation in Scheme or C that would exist in parallel with
> `(ice-9 optargs)'; or enhance `(ice-9 optargs)' to allow a dependent
> implementation such as the one I submitted to work correctly.
>
> What do you think?

I'm still not convinced by the last option.  Given the above, Option 2
(that is, writing our own, preferably in Scheme) seems to be the safest.
Hopefully this isn't too much work, but the above quote indicates that
we should be careful about performance.  ;-)

Would you like to try doing it?

Thanks,
Ludovic.