Re: following up on speed

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Well, if you're going to try to do benchmarking, aisde from all the 
other issues
that arise when we translate a program between C and Scheme, you should
really use the best available malloc/free.  After all, if someone 
"demonstrated"
that GC is "slow" by using one of the slower GC's available, you 
wouldn't consider
that fair.

To the best of my knowledge, the Doug Lea malloc is the best extant:

http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html

(I find it utterly astonishing that the answer to "how do you do the 
best malloc/free"
had not been completely solved by the time I came on the scene in 1976. 
 It seemed
so obvious that this must be a Solved Problem, the answer to which could 
simply
be looked up in Knuth, that it didn't even occur to me that there might 
be room for
improvement.  I guess it goes to show that one should not take things 
for granted...)

-- Dan