[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
following up on speed
Simon Cozens spoke before I did in the "Worse is better panel".
One of the last things he said was something like "why does the better way
have to be slower?".
I didn't have an immediate comeback, even though I've studied profiling and
the relative performance of Lisp and C programs,
http://openmap.bbn.com/~kanderso/performance/
The Peter Norvig pages i recently used in a reply to this list contains
some benchmark results which contained a pointer to a larger set of results:
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/
Perhaps we can use this data to get a relative sense of the performance of
the language we've been talking about. I realize how hard this is, so i'm
not trying to pick on any language here.
I think this is a good topic for this panel, because performance was a big
issue for Dick Gabriel. He and others made substantial improvements to the
performance of Lisp and other other languages. But he also said that
performance wasn't the only issue, or the most important one. This could
explain why lightweight languages are so important, they focus on important
issues.
k