[racket-dev] [racket] "lab notebook on learning process" (was: Re: Macros baffle me)

From: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (samth at cs.indiana.edu)
Date: Tue May 6 13:43:30 EDT 2014

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>> > Why does he think "Performance sucks"?
>>
>> Because here's the list of things that are slow
>
> DrRacket is an operating system running on top of your other OS
> to make life for Racket developers simple. It was originally developed
> for beginners, but I eat my own dog food, and I find it good (tm) for
> every day Racket work.
>
> To evaluate performance, run the programs at the command line. Measure
> there. Compare with other dynamically typed languages and report back
> what you find. If you still report performance problems, try to be precise.
> We are proud of Matthew and how far he has pushed Racket's performance on
> real software, the kind you use on a daily basis, not just minibenchmarks.

I think ultimately that this answer isn't enough. If everyone who
tries out Racket in the way we suggest comes away with the impression
that it's really slow, suggestions on the mailing list to measure
differently won't eliminate the negative first impression, let alone
for all the people who _don't_ ask about it.

Could we
- warn people when they use `time` in DrRacket?
- provide a "performance" mode that runs programs out-of-process, or
just in another place?
- something else?

Sam

Posted on the dev mailing list.