Re: Making Lilypond faster

[Valentin Villenave]

On 6/3/20, Paolo Prete <paolopr976@gmail.com> wrote:
> Did you succeed (or someone else) in compiling with guile-3, meanwhile ?
> If so, did you see some improvement in speed?

No, for now guile 2.0 has become nearly as reliable as 1.8 but there
remains a noticeable performance drop; building LilyPond with guile
2.2 is possible but triggers some annoying bugs, and with guile 3.0 I
don’t think anybody’s even been giving it a try. The only sure thing
is that 2.20 will be the last stable version requiring guile 1.8,
since that’s been phased out in most GNU/Linux distributions. And,
yes, the possibility of using JIT bytecode starting with Guile 2.0 can
potentially lead to a speed gain, but not until several additional
bugs have been ironed out.

That being said, regardless of the Guile situation, there is a lot of
ongoing optimization work on LilyPond’s c++ code, logic and
computation, which should eventually lead to a speed gain of at least
15 or 20% (I think) on some parts of the processing. The next stable
release will certainly be quite interesting.

Cheers,
-- V.