[gambit-list] loc count

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Tue Feb 17 20:50:31 EST 2009


On 17-Feb-09, at 5:34 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> [...] (on my computer that's about 3 times slower than /bin/sh, but
>> still twice as fast as Scheme48 (which also has a 3 MB footprint)
>> and about 30 times faster than mzscheme). [...]
>
> If you run mzscheme just like that (eg, mzscheme -e "(exit)") then
> you're loading stuff that is useful only for an interactive REPL.  On
> my machine, this takes 169ms.  But if you run it with
>
>  mzscheme -I scheme/base -e '(exit)'
>
> then it goes down by a factor of 10 to 17ms.


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.

Marc






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