On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:

On my MacBook Pro, after a few iterations (to get the executables into the disk cache), I get:

% time gsi -f -e '(exit)' < /dev/null

real 0m0.012s user 0m0.005s sys 0m0.006s

% time mzscheme -I scheme/base -e '(exit)' < /dev/null

real 0m0.057s user 0m0.037s sys 0m0.014s

So mzscheme is still a factor of 5 slower to startup and exit, and with Gambit you get all the REPL stuff included, which is really important if you want to be able to debug your code comfortably if something goes wrong (I would expect this to be an important point for most users given that this is an advantage of using Scheme... indeed the default in mzscheme is to include the REPL support).

Anyway my point is simply that even though the Gambit runtime may seem big, it still is lightweight to use.

Hey Marc -- those are impressive numbers indeed!

I think, tho, that maybe you overstate the case a little bit. You do seem to be beating mzscheme fair and square and, if counting the number of exports is the right thing to measure, scheme/base has a similar number to what you wrote earlier (it has 1193 exports if I did the computation right -- I'm sure Matthew can correct me if I've made a mistake).

But when Eli said "all the REPL stuff", I think he just meant a larger library. The basic scheme library, for example, has 2847 exports, which is (I think) what you get when you pass no commandline options to mzscheme.

Anyways, just a minor quibble and kudos on the speed with which gambit starts up!

Robby