Re: Implementation Language

[Doug Evans <dje at transmeta dot com>]

Ben Elliston writes:
 > So does Guile follow a similar philosophy to Tcl -- to write performance
 > critical aspects in C and provide hooks into Scheme?

Dunno in general, but that's certainly not excluded.  The hooks are
there, it's up to each app to use them or not.

 >     > Do we have any performance issues with Guile?  
 >    Yes!!!
 > 
 > Can you expand?  I don't really consider the performance of code generation
 > to be that critical -- look at G++ these days.

Also look at how long cgen takes to run vs the gen* fns in gcc.
I don't mind the wait (much), but for the general audience I think
that there's an order of magnitude speed up to be had
and one way or another, I think it'll be thrust upon us.
I'd rather the end result still be Scheme.
[The Guile powers-that-be now believe (I think) that the current
implementation isn't the best way to go and someone is writing
a faster engine.  Dunno how much of a speed up we'll get.]

btw, I'm playing with Rscheme a lot these days.
http://www.rscheme.org
This is a Scheme implementation that rocks! (IMO)
Speed-wise I think it also has a way to go, but
the internals and design appeal to my aesthetic tastes (ymmv)
in a way that Guile probably never will.