[racket] I've implemented a Scheme Interpreter. But it's too slow. Next step?

David Kranz's dissertation has a lot of interesting material about
implementing closures efficiently.
http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf

Andrew Appel's book Compiling with Continuations also covers similar
material.

Vincent

At Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:42:07 -0400,
Patrick Li wrote:
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> Hello everyone,
> 
> For educational purposes, I've implemented a simple Scheme interpreter in C,
> but it's way too slow at the moment. (eg. just macroexpanding and evaluating
> a function definition takes a few seconds.) I would like some advice on how
> to proceed next to get a adequately performing Scheme system.
> 
> My goal is simply to get out of C as quickly as possible. ie. Get the basic
> forms and a macro system working which will allow me to write the rest of it
> in Scheme.
> 
> So far this is what I have done:
> 
> I wrote a simple Scheme interpreter in Scheme in continuation-passing style,
> so that I can get call/cc working.
> 
> Then I basically just manually translated that code into C. So all
> continuations are heap allocated.
> 
> How should I proceed from here? These are the options that I've come up
> with:
> 
> (1) Optimize variable lookup. Currently the environment is represented as a
> list of key-value pairs. Variable lookup is done by searching through the
> list.
> 
> (2) "Analyze" the code before evaluating it (ie. as in SICP). Ie. for an
> (if) form, it will determine that it is an if form during the analysis
> phase, so that at execution stage it won't have to repeatedly figure out
> what sort of form it is.
> 
> (3) Write a very simple VM, and develop a simple byte-code compiler.  The
> problem here is that I don't really know how to deal with first-class
> continuations.
> 
> Thanks for your help
>   -Patrick
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