Re: Low level things in C or Scheme

[Ken Anderson]

We've had similar experience with JScheme, a Scheme in Java. Two projects i 
know about are 60% and 80% Scheme.  In the second case we prototyped a key 
component in Scheme and eventually rewrote the guts of it in Java, though we 
still use Scheme data structures such as pairs inside.  All the external 
control is done in Scheme.  

At 09:34 PM 4/29/2003 +0200, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
>Thamer Al-Harbash <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> It's funny you should talk about layering. I've recently started
>> writing a project at work (or re-writing for the Nth time thanks
>> to changes being requested), and I chose doing the high level
>> work in guile just so I could say "ok done," and get back to more
>> important things.
>>
>> The funny thing is, thanks to guile's seamless use of arbitrarily
>> big numbers (its numerical tower), I don't know if I *want* to do
>> my number crunching in C anymore. This project is slowly becoming
>> 100% scheme as I remove the final bits of C from it.
>
>I've been through something similar.  I've written a neuron simulator
>which I've used in my research for several years.
>
>Originally, a lot of things was done with C++.  Guile was only used as
>a scripting language, gluing pieces together.  Then, during the years,
>I tended to do more and more on the Scheme level.
>
>Now, I write almost everything in Scheme.
>
>> I have not noticed any significant penalty in performance.
>
>For me, there would be a penalty if the inner loops were on the Scheme
>level.  Now, however, I do most computations using my Matlab-like
>GOOPS-based matrix library
>(http://kvast.blakulla.net/mdj/matrix-1.2.0.tar.gz).  So, even though
>the algorithms are written in Guile Scheme, the overhead gets drowned
>by the heavy crunching vector and matrix loops on the C level in the
>library.

Sounds nice.  Do the xlisp-stat guys know about this?

>(BTW, if any of the people who have written to me regarding this
>library and possible collaboration with other projects, I have to
>apologize for not getting back to you quickly.  I will do that soon.)
>
>Best regards,
>Mikael D.
>
>
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