Re: Guile benchmark

[Linas Vepstas]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 3:56 PM, Mike Gran <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> On Thursday, January 26, 2017 7:31 AM, Rchar <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>> Is Guile slow or fast, comparing to others?
>
> Guile is about average compared to the others. But it depends
> on the specific task. It is usually not the fastest or slowest.

FWIW, I have C++ code that has bindings both to guile and to python,
via cython.  The guile bindings were faster than python, which then
caused the cython maintainer to enter a nuclear arms race, to improve
performance, doing things like caching values in various places to improve
performance.  But then, one can do the same in guile, and it becomes a
game of who can be more clever in optimizing.

I do have one complaint: guile has a fairly hefty overhead in entering
and exiting: I forget now, and the measurements were done on a
circa-2011 PC, but I was getting something like 7K guile enter-exits
per second, which limits the speed at which you can cross the C/guile
boundary.   You can avoid this cost by entering guile and then caching,
but this requires some C-coding cleverness that naive users won't do.
(I'm currently getting maybe 500K/sec or 1M/sec guile-C crossings, but
only if I do this caching trick).

--linas