[plt-scheme] A Comment on MzScheme Performance vis-a-vis Web Applications

I have rerun all of the existing MzScheme benchmarks using 301.16, and have
found in all cases that Matthew was right:  MzScheme is much faster than
MzC.

Earlier, someone asked if MzScheme was slower than Python; the answer is
unequivocally yes.  However, if you look at how MzScheme stacks up against
PHP and Ruby, things look much better:

On the microbenchmarks, MzScheme makes a good showing against PHP and Ruby:
"http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/old/benchmark.php?test=all〈=mzscheme&lang2=php"
"http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/old/benchmark.php?test=all〈=mzscheme&lang2=ruby"
 
However, once we move into the newer more 'real world' type benchmarks,
Ruby pulls further ahead, while MzScheme continues to pummel PHP:
"http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all〈=mzscheme&lang2=php"
 "http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all〈=mzscheme&lang2=ruby"

So, while MzScheme has made some big advances in performace this past year,
we still have some ground to cover to compete against the likes of Python and Ruby.

Interestingly, MzScheme seems to have quite good performance compared to PHP (even taking
into account PHP's Zend optimization sytsem).  Since PHP seems to have the lion's share
of the web application marketplace, there doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong
with MzScheme's current performance if the goal is to produce a web application.

-Brent