Re: Why is guile still so slow?

[rixed]

-[ Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 01:56:32AM +0200, Jose A. Ortega Ruiz ]----
> Couldn't you use the FFI?

While FFI makes indeed things simplier, it's only one part of the story.
Scheme/C integration involves also:

- main() func can be C or Scheme (in order to slowly goes from C to Scheme)
- Scheme runtime must support posix threads so that the important C threads
  are not interrupted by evaluation/compilation/GC

> I haven't used Guile's yet, but hooking to
> inotify in Racket was a breeze...

Nor do I have used FFI from guile myself, but I've seen it used in Andy's
guile-sqlite3 bindings and it's nice. See it here for instance:

https://gitorious.org/guile-sqlite3/guile-sqlite3/blobs/master/sqlite3.scm

> Of course, if C-level performance is
> a requirement, you'd need to switch to a CL compiler ;-)

Many CL compilers are wonderful but there is no reason why a Scheme
compiler can't be made faster. Anyway, you'd have to get rid of the
dynamic type checks and the GC to match C speed, so we won't see this
happen soon.