Re: [Pika-dev] Re: Pika Scheme project announcement

[Daniel Skarda]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:
> Elk seems to be the closest thing, and indeed the debian package desc says:
>
>    Elk is an implementation of the Scheme programming language, designed
>    specifically as an embeddable, reusable extension language subsystem for
>    applications written in C or C++.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with it?

  About one year ago I was benchmarking various scheme and clisp 
implementations.
It was rather for fun and play than any serious work and I have not got too far
(shame). From my results, Elk was among slowest scheme interpreters and some
tests Elk did not even finished because of SEGV (at least elk 3.0 from debian
package).

  My impression was: if you want scheme as an extension language, use Guile (it
still has a label of official GNU extension language, but I do not know if 
development has any direction or goal). If you want fast scheme, use some
scheme->c compiler. It also seems that it is not that hard to write faster
interpreter than Guile. (*)

0.

(*) Note that I did only few shallow tests (and than got bored and silently
retired to do something more useful :) I did not test any particular feature
like call/cc, catch, ports, string manipulation or number crunching. My tests
involved mainly iteration, vector access and list processing.