Re: [Chicken-users] Re: [gambit-list] Help With Memory

[felix winkelmann]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Marc Feeley <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Felix.  I did not mean to drag you into this discussion.  I know
> performance benchmarking is one of your buttons that is best left untouched!

I'm happy to have taken my little part in it.

>
> All of this started with this message on the Gambit mailing list about the
> performance claim that call/cc in Chicken was "free" because of Cheney on
> the MTA and that Gambit used the same approach:
>
> On 24-Sep-08, at 11:14 AM, Per Eckerdal wrote:
>
>>> Chicken.  Cheney on the MTA gives you call/cc essentially
>>> for free - it's just as fast as any other function call.
>>
>> I was under the impression that Gambit also did this.. Am I wrong?
>>
>> /Per
>
> My response was that Gambit's continuations are based on a completely
> different approach which gives just as good performance, using the ctak and
> fibc benchmarks as simple evidence.  A complete analysis of the two
> approaches would take a lot of effort, which is why I used these benchmarks
> as a quick-and-dirty way to evaluate the performance (it turns out that ctak
> is much better than fibc as a benchmark for call/cc because fibc does many
> other things than just call/cc, i.e. it measures other optimizations of the
> compiler).

Right, but aren't all benchmarks just quick-and-dirty? (hopefully
quick, of course).

Note that in chicken the continuations that the Scheme programmer sees are
not the real ones: they are wrapped in a closure and must perform extra
work checking dynamic-wind thunks. There are some internal procedures
(##sys#call-with-direct-continuation and ##sys#direct-return) which are
really cost-free, as they use directly the implicit continuations that
are created
in the compilation processs.

>
> Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to compare Gambit and Chicken as
> systems.  If that was the case I would have much more to say and obviously
> would conclude that Gambit is better ;-)

Of course.


cheers,
felix