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From: hbs@LUCID.COM (Harlan Sexton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: [sinyaw@sun.com: Re: LISP vs LISP->C performance]
Message-ID: <9008220032.AA04994@kent-state>
Date: 22 Aug 90 00:32:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

In reply to sinyaw@sun.com:   
   
   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?

I don't know specifically about Scheme, but a lot of Common Lisp products,
including the 4.0 release of Sun Common Lisp, have profiling tools in them.
Also, if you are using a Lisp->C translator, most C compilers have a
profiling "switch" (and associated library) that you can use.

Finally, if you know the stack format for your system and have a timer
interrupt (such as the profiling timer interrupt on BSD systems), you can
write a backtrace profiler pretty easily that is quite useful.


--Harlan