Thanks for all the suggestions! I'll look over those and see what's happening.<div><br></div><div>I have profiled my code, and noticed that it spends most of the time in typechecking the arguments to the cons, car, and cdr primitives. I currently know of no simple way to eliminate those checks while still giving me relatively sane error messages for when things go wrong.</div> <div><br></div><div> -Patrick<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Vincent St-Amour <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:stamourv@ccs.neu.edu">stamourv@ccs.neu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> David Kranz's dissertation has a lot of interesting material about<br> implementing closures efficiently.<br> <a href="http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf" target="_blank">http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf</a><br> <br> Andrew Appel's book Compiling with Continuations also covers similar<br> material.<br> <br> Vincent<br> <br> At Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:42:07 -0400,<br> Patrick Li wrote:<br> ><br> > [1 <multipart/alternative (7bit)>]<br> > [1.1 <text/plain; ISO-8859-1 (7bit)>]<br> <div><div></div><div class="h5">> Hello everyone,<br> ><br> > For educational purposes, I've implemented a simple Scheme interpreter in C,<br> > but it's way too slow at the moment. (eg. just macroexpanding and evaluating<br> > a function definition takes a few seconds.) I would like some advice on how<br> > to proceed next to get a adequately performing Scheme system.<br> ><br> > My goal is simply to get out of C as quickly as possible. ie. Get the basic<br> > forms and a macro system working which will allow me to write the rest of it<br> > in Scheme.<br> ><br> > So far this is what I have done:<br> ><br> > I wrote a simple Scheme interpreter in Scheme in continuation-passing style,<br> > so that I can get call/cc working.<br> ><br> > Then I basically just manually translated that code into C. So all<br> > continuations are heap allocated.<br> ><br> > How should I proceed from here? These are the options that I've come up<br> > with:<br> ><br> > (1) Optimize variable lookup. Currently the environment is represented as a<br> > list of key-value pairs. Variable lookup is done by searching through the<br> > list.<br> ><br> > (2) "Analyze" the code before evaluating it (ie. as in SICP). Ie. for an<br> > (if) form, it will determine that it is an if form during the analysis<br> > phase, so that at execution stage it won't have to repeatedly figure out<br> > what sort of form it is.<br> ><br> > (3) Write a very simple VM, and develop a simple byte-code compiler. The<br> > problem here is that I don't really know how to deal with first-class<br> > continuations.<br> ><br> > Thanks for your help<br> > -Patrick<br> </div></div>> [1.2 <text/html; ISO-8859-1 (quoted-printable)>]<br> ><br> > [2 <text/plain; us-ascii (7bit)>]<br> <div><div></div><div class="h5">> _________________________________________________<br> > For list-related administrative tasks:<br> > <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>