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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Scheme optimization (was Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?)
Message-ID: <1991Jan17.054800.9036@Think.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 91 05:48:00 GMT
References: <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
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In article <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>Scheme literature thus far available (Steele [1], Dybvig [2], Kranz et al.
>[3] just to mention a few) seem to suggest that scheme may not need much in
>the way of efficiency tricks (except perhaps to indicate to the compiler
>that built-in functions will not be re-defined) to be compiled and
>optimized properly.  [On the other hand, arguably a case may be made for
>additional constructs for even *better* results]

Most of the papers I've seen about optimizing Scheme compilers have
concentrated on optimizing the *control* structures (the simplest of which
is the basic transformation of a tail call into a jump).  Common Lisp
optimizations are geared towards removing some of the overhead of dynamic
typing, i.e. allowing generic functions (arithmetic and array operations,
in particular) to be compiled into type-specific code.


--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

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