I have some performance related questions about the PLT runtime. These are mostly for Matthew, but I'm posting this to plt-dev in case anyone else is interested in the answers, or can supply one.
One, there are some functions that I memoize with a weak hash table. Are there any sorts of values that will never be collected, and will persist forever in the hash table? For instance, do word-sized values like fixnums or ASCII characters stick around? Two, I've gotten the impression that special casing variable-arity functions at some fixed arities via case-lambda will speed up the common case. Is this true, and if so how significant is the difference (as a general order of magnitude)? Is there some cutoff past which this specialization no longer pays off? I know there's no a priori precise answer, I'd have to experiment for that, but if there's a representation change (e.g. functions calls with more than 8 arguments get allocated as lists regardless) it would be useful to know. Thanks for any help. Carl Eastlund _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
