[Chicken-hackers] Language shoot-out: chicken vs. chicken-boot ends 1:2

[Jörg F . Wittenberger]

I'm surprised:

yesterday I posted this trivial diff
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2011-10/msg00119.html
after I found that this would double the speed of the chicken compiler.
(the "chicken" compiler run itself, not the whole build process
with gcc et al (since not effected); also other software will not benefit
as much as the compiler run: for my prog for instance I found at most 25%
of a difference)

Now I spent about an hour to try to create a chicken-boot executable,
which would perform as the installed chicken.

No way!:

$ time ./chicken-boot irregex.scm -optimize-level 2 -include-path . 
-include-path ./ -inline -ignore-repository -feature chicken-bootstrap 
-no-warnings -explicit-use -no-trace -output-file irregex.c

real    0m19.479s
user    0m19.220s
sys     0m0.170s


$ time chicken irregex.scm -optimize-level 2 -include-path . -include-path 
./ -inline -ignore-repository -feature chicken-bootstrap -no-warnings 
-explicit-use -no-trace -output-file irregex.c

real    0m10.189s
user    0m9.980s
sys     0m0.170s


What's the difference?

(I recompiled the installed chicken even twice uninstalling it in between.)

The 19 second figure btw is within the measuring error to the 21 seconds
as git master would need on my machine.

Which means there is (probably just)one important difference in those
two compilers.  I'm really curious to learn about it!

Cheers

/Jörg