Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

> I just tried a silly microbenchmark to get an idea of the byte-code
> interpreter's performance:
>
>    (let ((x 0)) (dotimes (i 10000000) (setq x (- i x))) x))
>
> and on my machine, it took 3.5s compared.  This isn't super-fast
> compared to Emacs-24.3 which takes 6.7s in the purely interpreted case
> and 1.7s in the byte-compiled case.

I could not resist to compare this with my favorite 'pure and powerful'
(and interpreted) PicoLisp:

,----
| : (bench (let X 0 (for I 10000000 (setq X (- I X))) X))
| 0.338 sec
| -> 5000000
`----

while the Emacs Lisp version on my machine yields:

,----
| : (benchmark-run nil (let ((x 0)) (dotimes (i 10000000) (setq x (- i x))) x))
`----

-> (3.5045056839999997 0 0.0)

See 

,----
| http://picolisp.com/wiki/?PILvsEL 
`----

for more speed comparisons between PicoLisp and Emacs Lisp.

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten