Yesterday at the MSLUG meeting Houman Zolfaghari gave an interesting
talk on the use of Scheme in the "real-world". In his presentation he
said that in his work he uses both C++ and Scheme; the parts that do
floating-point intensive computations are programmed in C++ and the
scripts are written in Scheme. An audience member asked why Scheme
was not being used for the numerical computations. Houman stated, as
if it was common knowledge, that C++ had better performance than
Scheme on numerical computations. I have heard this misconception
from several people, and I am compelled to set the record straight, at
least to the MSLUG members who should know better.
Brad Lucier has been using Gambit-C for floating-point intensive
computations for a long time. His involvement with Gambit-C has
helped me improve the compiler's performance on numerical
computation. For the kind of computations that he does (partial
differential equations) the performance of Gambit-C is equal to that
of C. The short paper he wrote on the subject, presented at the 2000
Scheme workshop, is: