[plt-scheme] xxx chooses MzScheme as preferred language

On May 31, 2006, at 4:31 PM, Brent Fulgham wrote:

> Paulo wrote:
>> Wow, I must say the interface is very nice. It is sad, however, that
>> the results for MZC Scheme are not nice. Which is one of my worse
>> fears... Scheme is nice but when it comes to speed, you just can't
>> compare it with C/C++.
>
> Not true.  Compare Bigloo with Python (much faster) and C, which it  
> only
> looses to by a factor of 2 or so.
>
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/old/benchmark.php? 
> test=all〈=bigloo&lang2=gcc

Bigloo isn't Scheme per se. To achieve such numbers, you're programming  
in a special-purpose language, especially when it comes to floats. You  
write (fp+ ...) everywhere. In Bigloo you declare types at module  
boundaries.

Chez achieved this kind of efficiency in 1993 (without all these  
hacks). Bruce Duba and I showed our systems hacks at Rice that their  
claims were wrong. But boy we had to bend over backwards to get Chez  
-o3 to be within 10% of then-C compilers. And the very moment we went  
from ints to floats, we were hosed again (and didn't pursue it).

Stalin is supposedly even better. None of us has gotten it to work,  
though I have watched Quod use it.

Lareceny may one day be there. They always claim that they are about to  
catch up.

When I see the performance combined with the expressive power of  
MrEd/MzScheme, I will buy it.

-- Matthias