[gambit-list] Fwd: loc count

Robby Findler robby at cs.uchicago.edu
Tue Feb 17 21:28:34 EST 2009


On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Marc Feeley <feeley at 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



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