Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!sinyaw From: sinyaw@starbright.sinyaw.EBB.Eng.Sun.COM (Sin-Yaw Wang) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: Re: LISP vs LISP->C performance Message-ID: Date: 21 Aug 90 17:09:18 GMT References: <9008151749.AA23832@mailhost.samsung.com> <1438@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc Lines: 31 In-reply-to: krulwich@ils.nwu.edu's message of 21 Aug 90 14:16:20 GMT In article <1438@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> krulwich@ils.nwu.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes: From: krulwich@ils.nwu.edu (Bruce Krulwich) Date: 21 Aug 90 14:16:20 GMT Lines: 25 In article <9008151749.AA23832@mailhost.samsung.com>, gjc@mitech writes: >Interesting side-note: A company called Chesnut software was at AAAI >showing their LISP->C translator. It was interesting in that it >produced *readable* C code. ... >The disturbing thing was that it seemed to give BETTER performance >than native lisp implementations from the other 3rd-party lisp vendors. >Tells you something about the state of the art of lisp implementation >if such a crude but effective hack as idiomatic LISP->C can do better. I too saw this product and was intrigued. I asked the vendor (who actually seemed to know the technical aspects of the system) why he got a speedup over most LISP's, and his thought was that it was because most LISP systems are written in a system-independant way, while most systems have a C compiler that is heavily optimized in system-specific ways. In other words, more work has gone into making sure the C compiler uses all the fastest machine operations whenever possible, while LISP compiler writers have presumably worried about other things like run-time environment and portability. To speed up your Lisp, or Scheme, code, there must be a way to measure its performance and profile the code. Is there any tool for this purpose? Say I've written a good-sized program, how do I find out where the program is spending its time?