[gambit-list] Gambit-C 4.0 beta 13

[Marc Feeley]

On 12-May-05, at 6:41 PM, Guillaume Germain wrote:

> On Thu, 12 May 2005 ben at fuhok.net wrote:
>
>> My guess is that this problem doesn't have much to do with your gambit
>> installation or with the speed of compiled vs interpreted code.
>
> I don't think that's correct.  Gambit's serialization of continuation 
> is slow, at least in part due to linear lookups being done on all the 
> serialized data when constructing the external representation.  
> Because of the closure representation used in the interpreter a lot of 
> data gets included.  The new table facility might be used to help 
> implement this in a more efficient way.
>

Indeed using tables to implement serialization would speed things up.  
Currently association lists are used, and this leads to a quadratic 
time complexity.  I had started changing the implementation to use 
tables but ran into some problems related to pretty-printing, so it 
will have to wait till the next release.

Marc