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From: lth@idiotix.cs.uoregon.edu (Lars Thomas Hansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: MIT Scheme performance
Summary: is it really that shitty, or is something weird happening?
Message-ID: <LTH.91Apr22235109@idiotix.cs.uoregon.edu>
Date: 23 Apr 91 07:51:09 GMT
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Recently, I downloaded the Sparc binaries for MIT Scheme 7.1 from altdorf.
Upon testing it, I found that performance was downright pitiful: given
the usual fib program

	(define (fib n)
	  (if (<= n 2)
	      1
 	      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

and told to compute (fib 20), MIT Scheme would take over 40 seconds!
Several other Scheme systems (Chez 3.0, T 3.1, Xscheme 0.16, Scheme48)
took from 1 to 4 seconds on same.

And no, this wasn't an isolated example of temporarily heavy load;
it's repeatable.

Is there something (obvious?) that I forgot to do, or simply is MIT Scheme
this bad?

--lars