Some Lisp-related comments, maybe a bit too off-topic here: On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > There was somewhere a performance comparison of a few scripting > languages, I'm not sure if it included a variant of LISP, but did > include perl/python and Lua fared very well. There seem to be some > other tests at <http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/> [...] (I > don't know which Lisp/scheme/ whatever sawfish used/s.)
Sawfish/sawmill uses librep <http://librep.sourceforge.net/> that is a Lisp dialect coming with a bytecode-compiler only. As for the main Lisp dialect of today, the Common Lisp, there are several decent native code compilers such as CMUCL that produce pretty fast machine code, often close to C (and sometimes faster). Speaking of the Shootout, you can look up the CMUCL performance in-there. On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Yaroslav Rastrigin wrote: > I know from experience - if you could quickly prototype something in > scripting language, it will very likely stay so, instead of properly > coded. Eventually, over time software manages to migrate from nice C > code with occassional interpreter calls to one large table of > callbacks exported to interpretable code and called from > there. Then, you start optimising scripted code for speed, implement > precompiling, next is crucial parts of C code are being implemened > as a library to chosen language, and suddenly you have fully > featured fully scripted system. This recalls the Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." ;-) One of the advantages of Common Lisp is precisely that it gives you the best of the both worlds: a language to develop your prototypes quickly, yet at the same time a language that generates fast native machine code. ``Two languages'' integrated under the same hood, easy to extend and manipulate at runtime. I wish Tuomo would have chosen CL, the issues of extensibility, configuration and stuff would be so direct there. ;-)
